I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

When we talk about the health of ocean ecosystems, I often hear the phrase existential threat.

It's a phrase that sounds massive. Because it is. It's something so big that it's hard to know what to do,

how to make the right choices, as just one person.

Today's poem probes those depths

and finds an endless possibility of existence

in the relationships between tiny beings.

Coral Again by Juliana Spar

And the big long waves surge through the inter-reef passages and break on the outermost reefs.

There a sea foam is made from the strong hydrodynamic forces, a witness of sorts to tidal flows, surf zones, these powerful, turbulent jets,

and eddies, around the flanks of reef. Beneath the whiteness, the coral on the shallow bottom rests its cells in the dappled sunlight.

And there also the single-celled algae, two forms of energy, and capture these two, as a lover and a beloved in a lyric.

When the waves are low, there is sunlight,

and so the holobiont is happy, growing.

When the water is turbid, when the light is limited, the corals then eat the algae.

This too, a form of happy.

By eating, I mean the algae lives inside the digestive cavity of the coral. By happy, I mean the give and take of vitamins,

trace elements, nutrients, carbon dioxide that should be understood as the most primal of loves. The lesson here is one of living in or on one another,

so as to build, maintain, and defend. One could make a politics of it.

This is what confused Ovid did,

misunderstanding the coral as stone,

not understanding its life.

...