by Murray Silverstein
Coral
—a 50th anniversary poem
Some sun reaches the deeper you go,
but only the weakest spectral blue,
so it takes a billion years,
but coral gives shelter to algae
while algae make protein for coral from light,
the protein which makes the skeletons glow
all those oranges, yellows, brilliant reds.
Each feeds each what light there is
the deeper you go. And it takes time,
but everything’s finally on fire.
Photo by Oleksandr Sushko on Unsplash
Murray Silverstein’s next book of poems, Red Studio, will appear Spring 2024 from Sixteen Rivers Press. He has been published in RATTLE, The Brooklyn Review, Cape Rock Poetry, Spillway, Poetry East, West Marin Review, RUNES, Nimrod, Connecticut Review, ZYZZYVA, Elysian Fields Quarterly, The MacGuffin, and Pembroke Magazine, among others. He has authored two books of poetry, Master of Leaves (2014) and Any Old Wolf (2007), the latter of which received the Independent Publisher’s Bronze Medal for Poetry in 2006. Silverstein is the senior editor of the anthology America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (2018), winner of the Independent Publisher’s Silver Medal for Anthologies in 2017. A retired architect, Silverstein also has co-authored four books about architecture.
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