After Their Stillbirth

Since he, bright little salt water fish,

swam from her to the distant deep trenches where

for survival, life must make its own light,

she has lived the tenuous life of a tide pool creature

deposited by her own out-rushing water

to cling where she could find solidity,

enduring the ebb and flow of salt tides.

By necessity, she has become hardy—

able to weather her harsh landscape

of sharp edges, buffeting current, capricious sun.

Biding time in this precarious tidal hole,

she considers swimming
after him, that slippery being, never

really hers. What holds her to these

restless permanent shallows

is knowing the bioluminescent organisms

of those darkness-held reaches

must consume any life drawn too close

to feed the light of their own.

This poem was my attempt to enter the mind of someone whose experience out-reaches my own-- a fictional person, but a real experience. I was trying to use metaphor to convey emotion without sentimentality. So, apologies if it is terrible. The whole thing began with the phrase "the tenuous life of a tide pool creature." I was trying to think what kind of life that was and who might be living it, and this is what I got.