Underwater Haibun
Confucius said, The beginning of wisdom is the ability to call things by their right
names. Here’s a few: patch reef, fringing reef, barrier reef. Fire corals, lace corals,
Gorgonians. Leaf and plate and sheet corals, flower and cup corals. Encrusting,
mound, and boulder corals. Branching corals, fleshy corals, brain corals. Black corals.
Here’s a few more: oil spills, climate change, ocean acidification. Overharvesting,
coastal development, habitat destruction. Bleaching. Crown of thorns. Algal blooms.
Then these: catastrophe, disaster, endangerment. Extinction. Disgrace.
the coral reef now—
ash trays the morning after
a wild party
—Submitted on 09/24/2022
Tim Tomlinson is the author of Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (Winter Goose Publishing, 2016), and This Is Not Happening to You (Winter Goose Publishing, 2017). Recent work appears in Big City Lit, Columbia Journal, Litro, and the anthology Surviving Suicide: A Collection of Poems that May Save a Life (Nirala Publications, 2021). He is the director of New York Writers Workshop, and co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. Tomlinson teaches writing in the Global Liberal Studies at New York University.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
