CREATURED
CONNECTION
poetry

BLUE BLOOD

Five months, entombed without food, light, warmth, they emerge
full of moon, mid of May, migrating from far reaches of the continental shelf:
horseshoe crabs following moon's ultraviolet rays with ancient eyes

Over rocks, through meanders, against currents, they glide upside-down,
mysterious shelled sea-spiders steering with long tails used
as arrowheads by Paleo-Indians twelve millennia ago
Among the ooze and fiddlers, barnacle-encrusted carapaces hook as one,
tearshaped bodies, ancient as the mother Atlantic, 300 million years
Compound eyes rise on stalks seeking spots to lay their teeming burdens

Scratching, raising clouds of muck, the waters obscured;
in a sucking, oozing rhythm, they deposit their primitive life, then
backing away, bodies still clasped, disappear among the depths

Twenty journeys of fifty thousand: a million eggs, greenish-
white. Life, yearning to evolve. Next: barley-sized, transparent
tadpole-like trilobite larvae, like the ancestor long-extinct

For millennia, the abundance has fed multitudes
of avian companions on the inexorable route northward:
turnstones and knots, sandpipers, laughing gulls, grackles

Now, they are diminished. One appears with an eye bored out,
gaping hole streaming water; the optic nerve torn out for study.
Thousands more, tossed into truck beds, left in the sun,

gills dessicated, bodies crushed for fertilizer; confined
as bait, the eggs eaten by eels, lobster, ducks, fish; thousands more
coveted for their blue blood, sucked for serum

from long-lived hearts who have beat steadfast, asking nothing
but to creep among moon's deep-sea'd shadows
They came and left silently with the sea's rhythms

Life,
ancient life, will
you return?

- Sue Holloway -

~ Excerpt from: Artemis' Arrow

Getting a taste of God's creation as it should be!

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