Coho

Highschool campus,
Crystal River running through.

One comes.
Then ten.
Now in thousands,
filling the river from bank to bank,
as – desperate to spawn –
the Coho Salmon crowd,
fight for place,
and make the river boil
with the passage of their
splendid numbers.

We too crowd the banks
to watch the pageant pass,
rainbow coloured spectacle
of life.
Days it takes for all this
roiling mass to fight their way
up the river to the places where
their lives began.

This used to be
a Trout stream, once,
before the Lamprey came;
predatory parasitic eels
sucking life,
decimating species.

Now restocked,
the Coho fill the
niche the trout had held.
And we are granted,
as we crowd the spanning bridge,
this awesome finned display,
this imperative to life.

At last they’re past,
have reached
their spawning grounds upstream,
reproduced and died.
And the cycle begins again,
ignoring us
who can only stand
along the river bank
and watch.
But what we’ve learned
while watching daily
no classroom can convey.


James Gagiikwe © 2008