O great Sturgeon, O great fish. Let
not our mourning be a final dirge.
May our grief ring THAT GREAT BELL
within these sacred precincts of freedom and
the hallowed alleys of liberty in this City of
Brotherly/Sisterly/Creaturely-LOVE.
You have been allusive and elusive
all your days; implying as you have
how you would be so very, very hard to find.
Building your life around the deep has kept
you so. Somewhat aloof and just out of reach.
Your snout, scutes, and slender, tender barbels
are arranged in a pre-historic cavalcade of rugged
and untouched beauty that is not lugubrious
as so many had once believed, just older
- much, much older - and more pristinely
evolved in precise ways that betray your
ancient, murky mystery and meaning.
And, what is your meaning if it is not splendor,
what is your place if it is not grand, and what
is your measure if it is not glory? Can there be
another old-one who will teach us such wonder as you?
One hundred twenty million years you hid among
the cavernous and the unbeknownst waters of this
earth-place with no hint of what we could do to you,
what we would do to you in 200 short years because
of our full-blown greed after gulping down your
precious roe - we could not forget the taste of you.
Your freedom to roam anadromously and find home
among two worlds only makes you more resilient.
Being away from your rivers you return back to spawn
and give birth to your young in the spaces your soul has
longed to inhabited forever. What have we done?
The taste in your mouth must be horrid when you
think of what we have done to the quality of your
waters, to the flow your rivers, the availability of
your caves. All now laced with toxic PFAs.
We set ourselves to harvesting your “black gold”
eggs as if they were our sole purpose for emerging
from the swamp. Piling your lifeless bodies in
mountains of flesh we felt compelled to eat you
once we gutted you for your luscious prize.
Degradation is not a word you taught us, degradation
is a word we made you to say. We forced its sounds to
come out of your mouths as our dredging and our ships
gave you no option to know another way, no option
to live on into post-historic places.
Our blades cut you, our boats smashed you. We
should have known better. We have been only
thinking of ourselves - for most of our lifetime.
Our apologies must come as a troth. A loyalty
to the handful of your school which yet remains.
We are sorry. We pledge here TODAY to disrupt the
complacency. We are sorry. We pledge here TODAY
to make noise and write letters, to sing songs and post
posts. We are sorry. We tell you TODAY we need you
in our lives. We are sorry. Alongside us in the fight.
We are sorry. You are our most ancient kin-folk - living
so long here before our abuse. We are sorry.
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