Kei

when the waters are quiet, she likes to try
to quantify the taste
of darkness.
it helps to pass the endless time, the seconds
that tick and tick and tick as
the tides flow in and out.

yesterday the corals went still- they are already
still, you say, and yes, that's true but the fishes no
longer swim through them and the algae doesn't grow
and the salt doesn't linger like it wants, like it should.
the corals went still and the reef ground down
to a halt, and the fishes trickled away--
now she is surrounded by bleached white bones and
the remnants of all she loved and that,
that is the first taste of darkness.

once, long ago, she had companions-
brothers and sisters, mothers and wives-
the world turned and the oceans moved
and life moved within them.
now she is alone and she runs her tongue over
her faltering teeth in the shadows watching
the sharks starve in the bubbling vents.
she needs for nothing but they are naught but need-
so mortal. so vicious, so paper-thin.
a week without food and they perish.

last year she said goodbye to a whale-friend.
a minke, young, smaller than she yet
full of fire, of life-
it sang her a song of ultimate sorrow as it swam away,
gliding like an angel with eyes of steel.
how powerful the whales, they inspire her, they brought her
gifts in the beginning- they've been beside her for centuries.
now she is friends with their children, and their children's
children, and she must watch their progeny die-
for shame, to see them leave-
the tug at her heart when the last flip of a heavy tail
disappears in the twinkling dusk.
they will find sustenance nowhere else, if not here-
they are destined to sink.
she does not even speak their language but
she loves them with a ferocity nothing else has earned,
and their absence kills her every day.
that
is the second taste of darkness.

bedtime stories for the shrimps-
blind, now, but willing
and grateful to curl up on her shoulders, her hands,
clustered together for warmth and shelter
with their whiskers raised-
she knows the most marvelous stories, they claim,
in the tittering simple wrinkles of words they
spew whenever she's near.
the only creatures that remain, begging, endlessly,
for her attention, for anything remotely resembling
the feeling of food in their bellies.
she tells them of sunsets in faraway bays,
the lapping of waves on the sand.
she whispers the colors and their eyes roll back
in their heads as they weep and remember.
for shrimp, for all their simple and woe, have
the widest sight of any beast,
and know of colors no one else can see.
they always seem to leave sadder, but calmer,
and sometimes the same shrimps don't come back.

the whales were rough, but the plankton, those
were the hardest.
they clung so close to her skin that she could feel them
shimmering like sand against her scales.
they tucked themselves close and they cried and she
could not even reach their minds to calm them.
when they left she locked herself away in her cave
for days, and could not be consoled.
the turtles came knocking, the rays fluttered shyly by the
windows, and in time they all went away,
and she had nothing but the murals on her walls to
remember them by.
she has not gone above-sea for many years.
she does not want to smell the smoke, the trees, the fire,
the agony, the fear--
she does not want to breathe their dying breaths.
they are not meant to be shared.
she is a creature of the ocean, of darkness, but she remembers
and she aches and she lies among the bleached-white coral
and dreams with her eyes just barely open,
of days past and loves lost and of the bedtime stories--
the salt of her tears, somehow different, somehow shed
and sensed in the ocean water--
that is the third, and the last, taste
of the darkness.


Thank you to SkyTreader197 for this amazing poem

If I ever get lost, please return me to LordOrochimaru