Meet the Creatures of the Sea on the Wall

 Dr Abe V Rotor

Details of Nature Wall Mural

Living with Nature - School on Blog [avrotor.blogspot.com]
Paaralang Bayan sa Himpapawid (People's School-on-Air) with Ms Melly C Tenorio
738 DZRB AM Band, 8 to 9 evening class, Monday to Friday [www.pbs.gov.ph]

When life is bigger than you,
take it like a big fish;
don't let it go away, 
for no one will believe you.

The sun never sets, goes the adage

of a once powerful empire;

 it did. 

The sun never sets in the deep blue sea,

phosphorescence the secret,

indeed. 

                    

Creatures communicate in many ways,

including man;

dolphins and birds think sailboats 

are of their kind.

                               

Believe in sea monsters, 

giants, grotesque, fearful,

as they think also of man,

the biggest monster of all!

Once thought extinct millions of years ago,

 the Coelacanth rose from the deep,

exactly the same as its fossil in the museum,

challenging science of its feat.

Camouflaged juvenile shark is safe 

from its enemies,

while it lurks for some unwary prey

 in dual existence.  

                              

A school of fish of two kinds

traveling and hunting

in a treatise beyond science,

and folk understanding,

                              

Banded groupers like three musketeers,

adventure the name of their game;

Dumas could have been more delighted 

to have met this triumvirate in action. 

On the craggy sea floor life is barely perceptible,

the tenants are better when left alone;

if survival to others is transience and agression ,

here a fish can be mistaken for a stone.  

Not all big fish is an enemy,

it may be a guardian, too,

leading a school in its care, 

like the teacher we know.  
                

A niche is defined by species, boundary, and time,

by common friends and enemies;

yet in times of plenty niches are open and free,

to form wholesome communities.  

                   

The rainbow is Cathedral in the sky,

it matters not if incomplete,

or its colors dim, to lovers of Nature,

who pause in prayer and retreat.  

Swarming means danger, sensing enemies down below;

the school forms a circle like the pioneers of the Old West;

the young and fecund in the center, the bold on the guard,

collective survival is universal to evolutionary success.