trophic cascade
a free verse poem for riparian: the banks of our love
for Tatyana Petrovna
“I thought the only thing I was
Was grief
No, said a friend
You are also curious
And what do you want to know?
I want to know how the shoreline fits together, I said
And so I started walking.”
— from irreplaceable, Part 57
all this war
and plunder
has made me remember that
i want to know more about
life among the eelgrass
i started walking
soon, a marine gastropod mollusk
worked it’s way
into my heart:
the Taylor’s Sea Hare
hermaphrodites
who mate in groups,
they lay strings of gooey eggs
(80 million in two days!)
they crawl with one foot,
fly through the water
on wings &
have “hare”-like ears, which smell
threatened by development
& the toxic runoff of pesticides
their homes have been
ravaged by invasion
threatened by algal blooms &
the decimation of sea otters
(the apex predators of their homelands)
nevertheless,
the humble sea hares’
constant grazing
allows sunlight in
so seagrass meadows
can thicken
their bodies
& the eelgrass
form something like
a single system of liquid
with sea otters closing the loop
all one gesture
a trophic cascade
revealing
a larger logic:
that we are born into just one body
that we are everywhere, Bucha to California,
sentient & feeling everything
*Trophic Cascade is an ecological phenomenon triggered by the addition or removal of top predators and involving reciprocal changes in the relative populations of predator and prey through a food chain, which often results in dramatic changes in ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling.
This poem is one in a series titled, Riparian: the banks of our love, a poetic collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) with Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett.
To read the previous poem in the series click HERE.
To read the next poem in the series click HERE.
Michelle Puckett, MFA is a poet, doula, permaculturalist, coach and Co-Founder of Creating Freedom Movements, a social justice school for activists. All of her work aims to nourish the sacred and make it plain in every day life.
