eel grass - Sears Island
Here in Maine, there are the forests that we see, and the forests that most of us don't see. Earlier this year the Maine Department of Environmental Protection reported a 54 percent decline in eelgrass meadows in Casco Bay over the last four years. Eelgrass forms the base of a food chain that includes fish, shellfish, and waterfowl. It is also critical in maintaining water quality, reducing erosion, and absorbing and storing carbon dioxide. Warming waters are the primary drivers of eelgrass loss—Casco Bay and the Gulf of Maine are some of the fastest warming oceanic regions on the planet.
Here is a poem that I wrote for the eelgrasses of Sears Island, in Penobscot Bay, several years ago when they were threatened by the proposed construction of a deep-water port:
eel grass - Sears Island
Hard to be lonely
in the lushness of
eel grass, feeling the ocean's
ebb and flow -
hard to know
want or hurt or
waste, here below
the sun, the sky,
the water's edge of
grass and mud and
moving with the moon -
hard to know
the hearts of men, those
who would fill and spill and
kill all below
their own shallow depth of heart, their
line of sight -
hard to know these hearts,
hard to be alive
hard to survive
in the face of their
rush toward riches,
toward death,
hard to be alive.
by Gary Lawless
Gary Lawless is a poet of the Gulf of Maine. He is author of numerous books of poetry, including Caribouddhism and How the Stones Came to Venice. He and Beth Leonard have operated Gulf of Maine Books, an independent bookstore in Brunswick, Maine since 1979.
Eelgrass, ©Steve Karpiak, courtesy of Friends of Casco Bay.