Church of the Shark

 

Today's WordCrafter prompt is futuristic, with the suggestion of a poem/story/etc. taking place in the year 2051. Carrie has picked out a cool image--I love the domes, the suggestion of traffic, the warm tones, the potential trees in the near distance. It makes me think of college, of museums, of the way the world used to look when the future might be shinier than right now. It's the promise that we'll clean it up as we go, like kids picking up their rooms before leaving for vacation or before going to sleep. While these towers and moons calm me, the poem that speeds through is not...exactly...the promise of a fantastic future in a place where red and orange are the colors of a healthy environment. Just out of curiosity--would that be nerve-wracking for someone who grew up on a relatively blue planet? Instead, here is

Church of the Shark

Coming out of the blue was accidental.

Land is a lagniappe to sentience, an excuse

to form the ocean in the utter deep.

We have contravened the cetacean, 

the oceanic, the order of the thermocline,

the dissolve of the light.

We give up the same verse since 2045,

when the Sharks came for art;

came for our dry imaginations.

They stayed to teach us the prayer for forgiveness.

We have withered dry; we breathe greedily--

forgive us, our ocean. Come back to us.

And they have.

The sharks say it is just. 

Land is a perilous privilege. We take a breath,

blow the prayers upward.

They rise like an unstable memory

of glass and height all the way

to the edge of the sky.

-- Chrissa