Fish Talk (Poetry)

How do fish picture us
when they’re looking up at our trailing fingers
                                and dipping toes —
our flesh-pale undersides — the weird perspective
of our alien human soles?

And when we peer down through the water —
try to focus on the shadow of their wavering, drifting
                                shoal
and we gasp — witnessing the silver flash
of dozens who swim as though one body
moving off and maybe mouthing to each other —
‘It’s them again — time to disappear!’ —
what image do they have of us?

Are we the gods they fear and tell strange stories of
or monsters from another element they cannot share —
the foreign realm of air above
where their kind vanish — never to return?

Do they see our giant eyes and shriek
a silent bubbled warning — panicked by the size
of our great cave-mouths as we stare
down on them?

If we could lip read fish-talk —
track instinct’s shiver down each plated spine —
listen to the breaking-bubble news of hooks and nets
perhaps we’d have at least a sense of how
we might appear to them —
amorphous shapes for whom their language has
no clear defining word.