Fish Magic, by Elisabeth Weiss

Fish Magic, by Paul Klee (Switzerland) 1925

Fish Magic                   
 
Blessed are you washed up carcass
fluttering past the shallows
above the sea urchin spikes 
who find the stranger in you
to harbor their darkness.
 
Blessed are you cool Pacific. 
Your undulations hurl
murky visibility in a 
turquoise and navy ambush.
 
Blessed are you shad and shark
stargazer, razorbacks, rocket danio, 
grouper, quillback, pike eel.
 
I am forever in your debt, coral reefs. 
Though you are bleached, you protect
the barrier between ocean waves and beach. 
 
Even the tiny plankton and coral polyps, bless them.
The minuscule and the one celled. The Seahorse, 
Christmas Tree Worm, Harlequin Shrimp,
Cowry and Blue-Ringed Octopus astound me. 
 
Let us one day hold our breath and take in 
the exchange of fin and fibre, 
breathing deep into our pods,
calling to the bones that have fallen
to the ocean floor and reformed
in a world remade by our own bewilderment
by all that’s inside us
unprepared to meet what we catch sight of.

Elisabeth Weiss

Elisabeth Weiss has taught poetry in colleges, preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Porch, Crazyhorse, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Ekphrastic Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016 and was a runner up in the 2013 Boston Review poetry contest and the 2023 Small Harbor Hybrid Chapbook Prize. Her chapbook, The Caretaker’s Lament, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. Lis runs a refugee resettlement organization, North Shore Friends of Refugees, and works as a docent in a house built by a shipping merchant in 1768.