April 19, 2015Section B, Page 6
No news is good news, or so it was
for the horseshoe crab, four hundred fifty
million years, while the dinosaurs came
and then went. Now they’re making the news:
how we use them as bait, grind them up
for fertilizer, destroy their habitat,
but their ancient blood detects endotoxins,
makes possible our flu shots,
pacemakers, and hip joint replacements.
We are the aliens, newly arrived
on earth with our gleaming technology,
capturing them for our laboratories
where white-coated technicians
drain that precious blue blood.
Returned to the ocean, some survive the encounter.
There is a mystery in their mating,
something essential in the sand;
we don’t know what it is nor how
they know it’s there. He comes ashore
at high tide when the moon is full
and waits for her, clings to her
while she lays her many eggs. The ocean
and the moonlight are one. The ocean and the moonlight
and the horseshoe crabs are one. They are
Aphrodite’s children, spawned
at the dawn of our world when the goddess of love
rose, naked, from foam on the sea.
from Poets Respond