Lampreys
By onemorething
- 1481 reads
When you are raised in ooze,
what you understand is darkness:
hold me up to the light and I see
only the shadows of ancestors.
Even with nine eyes, youth is blind;
filters religious silt in boneless suspension
until the river floods again.
It is not biblical - only it aches
a diffusion of pain across my chest,
I don't like to say heart so precisely
as if this is a poem about love.
This is not a poem about love.
Reared in mud, these adults wind
their paths to sea, skin peeled back
to unveil sight at last and the expanse of life
must open up before them
as a blue symphony.
It is rather beautiful and moving
until you realise how they will eke out their living -
tongue-toothed, latched, hung
and fed from the existence of another.
Then, what revelation is it
that compels them to rejoin
their nascent water, but
don't we all go back eventually?
We all return to something.
Any atheist is defined by belief
even in opposition, these lampreys
who die to breed, to carry forth
their antediluvian histories.
And this sting in my breast,
when I can't weigh the emptiness,
but I know that it is heavy and
that it is always about love.
Image from wikimedia commons:
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Geotria_australis_by_Frank_Edward_Clarke.jpg
The nine eyes thing comes from folklore, as in if you counted all gills and their little snouts. There's lots of good stories about lampreys.
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Comments
This is so splendid - 'tongue
This is so splendid - 'tongue toothed latched and hung' - little suckers. All that Freedom/sight/independence expanding and the inconvenience of having to stop for LUNCH! I relate to the images of independance and dependancy here, watching lifecycles, can be overwhelmingly awesome, poignant, sad, and un/explicably so, all!...not knowing the Lamprey very well I'm wondering if they lose their sight when feeding, which would be sad indeed....the relationship of parasite and host in animals is facinating, as are the interdependencies of pollenation -orchids esp. Great poem, as deep as the Ocean! Nicky
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This was a great introduction
This was a great introduction into the life of this tiny creature Rachel. Now I'm intrigued to read more.
Jenny.
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"what you understand is
"what you understand is darkness" Powerful! Those first four lines are so sad. No possibility of nature v nurture
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I'm sorry, I didn't mean to
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude. I find them scary, like hag fish. You describe their lives so well, particularly the mysterious revelation that compels them to go back to where they started
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This poem is much more than a
This poem is much more than a scientific explanation of the natal philopatry of an aquatic creature such as the lamprey but it contains, as all good poetry does, metaphors and philosophical points Though it professes not to be biblical or about love it does seem to touch tangentially on the subjects of religion and, in the last stanza, love.
Even an atheist will say yes to the question “don't we all go back eventually?“ and agree to the statement that we “...all return to something” but I suspect that his answer would be: 'earth to earth, dust to dust'.
As always you expand your thesis eloquently and assuredly.
Luigi x
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