Moving Forward
Witness here,
the tenacity of a jellyfish
in the ephyra stage of its life cycle.
Presently, it resembles a fleshy snowflake:
Clear and flat, with a central mouth, and radial arms.
To visualize this better, you can imagine your open palm
contains the central mouth, and your fully extended
fingers are the radial arms. Now bring the
tips of your fingers together. This is
how an ephyra propels itself
gutsily through the water.
An ephyra’s arms are arranged
symmetrically around its central mouth.
This symmetry allows its movement in water
to be steady, and for its adult bell to develop fully.
Should an ephyra lose an arm in an accident,
scientists predicted them to simply grow
a new arm in place of the old one.
To test this, they performed
cruel tests (snip snip),
and through them, found
that the ephyra simply continue
struggling to swim with missing arms,
which causes them to flail rather pathetically,
but also serves to apply unbalanced forces on their
tiny, elastic bodies, which, over a day or two,
are pushed by aforementioned forces
into a new symmetrical pattern!
A different way to be whole,
through the very act of
moving forward!
Whale Fall
When a whale carcass
Avoids settling in shallow water,
And finds itself sinking deeper
Than three thousand three hundred feet
Below the surface,
While sleeper sharks
Consume soft tissue
in Bathypelagic water,
And bacteria break down
Protein in its bones
As it finally comes to settle
On the ocean floor.
It is possible for a whale
To ‘fall’
Longer than it has lived,
Sustaining a series of complex ecosystems
At each level that it sinks through,
On a cold, dark, journey
That could last up to
One hundred years.