PACIFIC REQUIEM

    

Prose-poem in response to reports that the Pacific Ocean is dying

     Your surges lulled me to sleep.  Your tantrums kept me awake.  Sunlight still shimmers from you as from taffeta, moonlight still paints you luminous and silver.

     Standing at your deathbed I watch the moon-moved swells push your dying weight out and back.  Once, your breath moved within those living depths.

     Where have all the seabirds gone, the gull and tern, who, skimming your surface, found in your depths a bountiful buffet?   Beneath the waves, whales are perplexed by unfamiliar tumors.  Along your beaches, seals struggle their way ashore to give birth to dying young.  Sea stars turn to mush: “Arms twist like contortionists, suckers peel from rocks, their bodies melt away.”

     Experts shake their heads: “Like a crime scene” (Oregon marine biologist). “Scene from a horror film” (Seattle KCTS special correspondent).   From kelp to krill--plankton, jellies, turtles, otters, dolphin--the food chain is broken, ill, mauled, bleeding.  Where there was colorful complexity, now there is only dirt.

     In fish restaurants from Nome to del Fuego, the elegant convey forkfuls of Fukushima to their rich mouths.

     How can I let you go, my favorite ocean?  As a child, I peered at tiny crabs, their world your tide pool.  Accompanied by porpoises, we sailed your trackless seas.  We aimed harpoons at sharks, drew albatrosses close with breadcrumbs to capture massive wingspreads on mere film, hauled dripping buckets of jellyfish to gaze at their translucent grace.  At night your living phosphorescence awed us, swirling its deep white furrow in our wake.

     If you die will all else follow?  Manmade debris, pollutants, the daily toxic flow infusing nuclear decay into your veins, sweep death around our trembling world. Gone the teeming species, gone the novelty, gone the brilliance and variety,

     gone the mystery,

     gone.

                                                                                                                                                                                       Jessica Reynolds Renshaw