Week #16: Creative Writing Challenge – How Could I Not?

If you could visit anywhere on earth for a one-month vacation, where would you go and what would you do?

How Could I Not?

I imagine
Flying in water
Clear like a sky void of clouds;
Hearing the chatter of snapping shrimp
and chomping parrotfish in their everlasting sand creation.
Seeing reds so red they have yet to be absorbed
Blues and oranges and greens soaring past with flapping fins
Domes of jutting calcium carbonate, odd angles.
Small tentacles creeping out, frantically pulled in with each water current
Alive, so alive

I imagine
Hiding in hidden holes
Living in nooks and crannies
Discovering crevices secretly shared.
Watching life exist.

I imagine
A community existing in perfect balance
One I can observe from a floating position
Non-intrusive,
 Looking down through coral-colored glasses.
Life, Death, 
Coming, Going
Staying

Thousands of miles away
The entire Pacific between us
I feel a sense of impending doom.
The heat strangles my heart and urges me to make plans 
Soon.

I imagine
A reef of gracefully sweeping algal filaments
Greens and browns and whites as far as the sunlight penetrates
The corals are gone, dissolved by acid and broken by abandonment.
Skeletons remain.
The fish have gone, starved or eaten.
Stillness reigns.
The holes and crevices and nook and crannies
Empty.

I imagine
A quiet ocean
A coral graveyard
Death
And I cry
My coming here contributes to it's destruction

But how could I not?
To see and experience nature in balance
The beauty of life and death
And know,
That it exists.
How could I not?

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