The sea is like a black-edged card.
Oil creeps in on a rising tide,
announcing doom: another spill.
As stricken seabirds, petrified,
lurch over rocks or huddle still
awaiting death, their feathers tarred.
Black fingers reach into our lives.
A tanker, carelessly maintained,
managed by fools, ineptly crewed,
has left our waters grossly stained.
When rich marine life faces crude
and brutish oil, nothing survives.
Behind this little tragedy,
as always, greed and grasping hands.
Voracious men, whose selfish world
is ruled by bankers’ brusque commands,
care nothing for the curses hurled
by we who toil beside the sea
to rescue one or two or three
fouled victims from spoiled habitat.
While many thousand birds have died,
survivors surely wonder that
this nurturing, sustaining tide
became, today, their enemy.
Richard Fleming
