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.