The Fisher King

When I was a girl, I lolled, guileless in Izola shallows,
flippering aside the flatbread stone loaves,
making myself seal-comfortable,
and marvelled at the flirt of tiny fish that flashed
in the founder of my benevolence.

It surprised me back then that these tiny slips of fish travelled
in schools so curiously thin. Where were the clutches of shrimp,
the Pipis, the Lugworms, the Bluebottles… all the scuttlers
and bubblers I was used to sharing a Southern sea with -
the Ghost crabs, the clams, the cockles, the starfish?
It was a shore forlorn of beings… other than humans.
  
Well, that was just the Old World, I reasoned - they’d trafficked away
all connection to Earth. We, I thought smugly, we nothing like that.

I marvel today how naive I once was, thinking here safe from the Great Die Off.  
As we handballed Gaia to the conglomerates, swapped ecosystems for pointless glut,
the Fisher King limped in on leprous feet.   

I see HIM hunched on His bleached coral throne, brooding over a great garbage gyre.
His subjects bob transparent necks - converging, jostling, offering fraudulent worship.
Should they persist they will conquer us all, pollute our systems with their particles.   
Let them not inherit the Earth.