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Wednesday, March 29, 2017

ELEGY ON BLEACHED CORAL

by Cally Conan-Davies


Huge sections of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching across hundreds of miles of its most pristine northern sector, were recently found to be dead, killed last year by overheated seawater. More southerly sections around the middle of the reef that barely escaped then are bleaching now, a potential precursor to another die-off that could rob some of the reef’s most visited areas of color and life. Photo by Terry Hughes et al./Nature.—The New York Times, March 15, 2017


Solar panels
on my roof
useless as ships
come to grief

Shrouded in
monsoonal rain
where the forest
meets the reef

A vague etching
of something strange
of levelled ghosts
passing away

Hue of the Eucharist
the chalky waste
of mute Cassandra's
stranded face

In shallow water
quiet and wet
like a long forgetting
human brain


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who lives by the sea.