A Sonnet at the Edge of the Reef
the Waikīkī Aquarium
We dip our hands into the outdoor reef exhibit
and touch sea cucumber and red urchin
as butterflyfish swim by. A docent explains:
once a year, after the full moon, when tides swell
to a certain height, and saltwater reaches the perfect
temperature, only then will the ocean cue coral
polyps to spawn, in synchrony, a galaxy of gametes,
which dances to the surface, fertilizes, opens,
forms larvae, roots to seafloor, and grows, generation
upon generation. At home, we read a children’s
book, The Great Barrier Reef, to our daughter
snuggling between us in bed. We don’t mention
corals bleaching, reared in labs, or frozen.
And isn’t our silence, too, a kind of shelter?
This poem is excerpted from The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, and Connection (Storey Publishing, 2025), edited by Alison Hawthorne Deming, a unique collection of poems from diverse contemporary voices that offers a range of perspectives on humans’ complex relationship with animals, celebrating and bearing witness to the lives of animals both wild and domestic.
This is the third of four poems from the anthology (plus our podcast) reprinted in Terrain.org over the second week of November 2025.
“A Sonnet at the Edge of the Reef” was previously published in Habitat Threshold (Omnidawn, 2020).
Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Pacific Islander writer from Guam. He is the author of five books, including his most recent collection of ecopoetry, Habitat Threshold (2020). He teaches at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Read Craig Santos Perez’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Wildfire” plus a conversation between Craig Santos Perez and Eric Magrane appearing in Terrain.org, “Inscriptions of Power Upon the Land.”
Header photo by Drew McArthur, courtesy Shutterstock.
