EJ Shu
are inadvertent: time after tide
myriad sessile bodies gather
and root to moorings, breakwaters, the
mammoth feet of turbines;
even waste
dumped in an estuary provides a
kind of scour protection, attachment
surfaces for fouling species, for
faunal communities;
others are
built by practitioners with degrees
of creative freedom, they are sewn
bags of mesh, of shells, the shells (cockle,
mussel and oyster) dried
on land and
purified of the bivalve trace, and/
or supplied stone, and left out on the
intertidal sandflats and fixed with
specialist pegs, exposed
to winds and
sometimes lost to currents; specious homes,
shallow roosts, room and berg surveilled; rec-
ordered: barnacle, amphipoda,
predatory worm, the
copious
footprints of gulls; colonisation
driven by the clefts in the matrix,
interstitial spaces chosen or
trapping those riding on
mobile sands.
Note: This poem uses fragments from the following scientific article:
Callaway, R. 2018. ‘Interstitial space and trapped sediment drive benthic communities in artificial shell and rock reefs’. Frontiers in Marine Science. 5. DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2018.00288
EJ Shu is an Australian-Canadian writer whose recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in Cordite, Poets Reading the News, Plum Tree Tavern and Psaltery & Lyre. She makes her home on the north west coast of Tasmania. http://www.ejshu.com/