Icarean

Elegy for an Anglerfish

Art by sydneybecrafty.

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Casket black was her abyssal home,
Dark beyond dark save for a light of her own.
The faint-glowing esca ‘afore her face,
Was the only way she ever knew her place.

She lived by icy currents and pressure gradients,
And her own little bulb shining ever so radiant.
Sometimes her beady eyes scried the dim sight of strangers,
More often her keen nose sniffed out food or warnings of danger.

But black was her world, like her own bulbous form,
A teardrop with needle-lined maw, fierce as any surface storm.
Her life- hunger and fear, lust and chase,
Primal and short, beautiful, and full of Grace…

One morn she knew t’would be the last of her life,
And she felt newfound fear of the everlasting night.
’Twas ice instead of blood coursing through her veins,
And she knew her meager Till had all but been drained.

Stillness was kind, the dark and the cold,
Her gills pulsed slower as the curtains closed.
Then verily about all at once she could see,
Firmly the dark sky above her spake- Come Hither Unto Me.

In benthic darkness she found an upswell,
And slowly rose from the abyss where all her life she’d dwelt,
At first her nerves spake fear, for this blue water was brighter, thinner,
Dizzy and cramped, her slow heart beat still ever dimmer.

But warm was the water, and her fear began to abate,
When for the first time she glimpsed a light she didn’t create-
An intangible shimmer, sparkling far, far above,
Glowing enticingly as she swam thither the way thereof.

‘Twas brighter, the shimmer, than her nightsighted eyes could handle,
Against this her own little light glew dim as a mere pennycandle.
But she dreaded not the wavering expanse beckoning overhead,
For there were more dismal places by far to maketh one’s deathbed.

As she approached, she heard too- the myriad songs of the sea,
Paeans of untold creatures, more than she’d ever seen.
Her inkdrop eyes, accustomed to the pitch black abyss,
Had never before witnessed endless, ethereal light such as this.

She stopped when she came within an ell. 
In the broad shimmer above all goodness seemed to dwell. 
It beckoned to her, a promise of… of flight. 
She swam up, and up…

And into the Light.

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