Today's poem is by Ricardo Pau-Llosa

The Reef Sermon
       

Among mountains sowed with seashells
I came to rest from myself and entered the sea,
walked on its sand beneath a foam of stars,
and stood before its city of bones. Thunderous
with fish, inks, prisms, shaded by ravenous
fronds, pocked with crevices, like a mind far
alien yet mind. Grown from learned debris,
a hive of lives in forms that will not tell
themselves from where they lie, or if craft or chance
it was that let them seem the saving trance
of belonging. The city of bones ranges beyond
the eye's grip, rises to air past veils
of spores. Its thorn touch belies its horizon
scope which nearness cannot contain, like trails
we pace in lost now's. By nature built
to anchor flux, shelter the wheel, tilt
the sun. It owes to centuries, not man, its debt.

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Copyright © 2023 Ricardo Pau-Llosa All rights reserved
from Birmingham Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission