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Just a girl with expressive emotions

Poems

The Great Barrier Reef
A beauty born out of rock and sand
Seldom touched by human hand
An image of beauty
Slowly demolished
By the unpolished

The Great Barrier Reef
An unexplained bleaching
Its beauty compelling,
Its color expelling.
It lays in pain,
Forever longing a voice.

The Great Barrier Reef
It burns with heat
A half now surrendered
To the changes from above
A feeling unknown
Whirlpools surging
Destroying all we’ve known.

The Great Barrier Reef
She’d given up
Hope.
The destruction will never stop,
Her perseverance now lost.
But maybe someday,
The world will once again live in peace.
The Great Barrier Reef
Ronnie Ng Nov 2011
I had a really bad day today,
so i went to the beach to meditate
by looking at the lapping waves.

Waves after waves relentlessly came
like a bunch of chopping knives,
rolling in to chip the reef away.

But these knives could not destroy the reef,
as they merely sculpted his body and face.
Through time the reef had been so well trained,
that the waves exploded and met their graves.

The reef had displayed such a strong disposition,
he could smile daily to face the ocean's challenge.


‎(Copyright Ronnie Ng, 2011)
Ann Marcaida Jan 2013
I. Neptune’s Theater


A rock spins through the universal tumbler

and its warm blue pools calcify

as turquoise Neptune in his cloudy blue bath bath

builds a lace castle with his fingertips


Sculpts a submerged eden of crimson and emerald

where painted parrots chat up cardinals

butterfly and angel fry sway with wave pulse

and foliated coral fingers beckon from arched windows.


Neptune’s children are flat and bright, spined and notched

free yet entangled in lace mesh ecosystem

beneath an array of bioluminescent stars

as a gangly pretender watches and blows bubbles.




II. Sapien Siege


The hot acidic hand of death grasps

the mesh rends and tangles

the ecosystem shattered

reef’s loosed children scream beneath planet’s stars.


Butterflies impaled

cyanide-swooning damsels

mesh-tangled angels hauled heavenward

coral to potash, corpses to coal.


The pretender to the throne blinks

rubs blurry lenses,

kicks plastic fins

and moves on to the next show


Unseeing and unaware

of the luminous filament in his wake.

Self-appointed divinity,

deus ex machina.

*****************­************

Ann says: All of the animal and human characters in this poem (except Neptune and The Pretender) are named after coral reef fish. Coral reefs, one of the most diverse ecosystems, are expected to be largely extinct within one human generation. Deus ex machina is Latin for “God from the machine.”

Copyright 2013 by Ann Marcaida.
Copyright 2013 by Ann Marcaida.

All of the animal and human characters in this poem (excepting Neptune and the quadruped) are named after coral reef fish. Coral reefs, one of the most diverse ecosystems, are expected to be largely extinct within one human generation.

Special thanks to my poetry coach, without whom I never would have gotten this poem to publication quality.  Also to anonymous reviewer G.W. who helped to steer me in the right direction.