Fish Being

Breath

On Being,
a dead fish

Without meaning to be
facetious
The ontology of dead fishes
Is not the first thing I find
On concentrating my mind;

But concentrate I did
When we had to get rid
Of our unalive fish
To accord with the wish
Of children to be kind
To the creature so still
Who’d once been a thrill
Of movement full of wonder
Bug-eyed and black as thunder
Bold and commanding
Yet nothing demanding
But an atmosphere of water
To pervade its quarter
By our glass encased
So transparently placed
Within our vision
Contained with precision
A space exact in glass
Through which you could not pass
Into that place transparent
Where you were just apparent
And we swam in the face of your stare
Gulping in our atmosphere of air.

©justWords, Thomas Albert Fox

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