Day 18 NaPoWriMo - Poemfish

I can't believe we're already on day 18 of NaPoWriMo. This month always seems to fly by. It's been a gorgeous week here in the Seattle area, plenty of much needed sun.

For day 18, we had to take a chapter heading from PoemCrazy by and use the heading as a title of our poem. I chose the header Poemfish and ended up writing a poem about Pacific salmon, Coho and Chinook, and their life cycles in the tributaries of the pacific rivers. They're whole survival and lifecycle is poetry.

Poemfish

I can write its mouth to speak and eat
and take a pebble from the river bed
and suck on it like hard candy or place
it in a quiet eddy next to more pebbles
next to the bring orange globes, suns,
like clusters of berries lying deep
in the water, no stems to pluck,
no branch or leaf, just the branch
of the cool river, like clear milk.

The shadows in the globes move,
fins and large eyes, they swim
in their capsules, moving, moving
their strong bodies against a current
of orange. The large fish comes back
with another pebble, then another,
labor after labor, its once bright scales
dull as the gray rocks of the river.

Its fins lined with scars, but like one muscle
it powered against whitewater, jumped
over waterfalls, bashed against the concrete
of every single dam and fish ladder,
to finally make it here, in this tributary
of a tributary, to spawn, to build its wall
of pebbles around the roe of its body,
to gather, create, protect, and send
forth downstream as its own body decays,
dies, floats belly up in the gentle current.

Its death feeds the roots of trees and
they open their leaves a little wider
to shade the banks of the river
to give safe passage to the young fish
as they move like rain clouds in the water,
as they move like poetry in the water.