#coral reef poem

[reeffairy]

Blue teal sea seals 

Believe there are blue teal sea seals

Still 

Made from still indigo sea teal steel  

Still Blue teal sea seals

That Pirates Steal

Sit very still 

Strong in still indigo blue teal steel 

the blue teal sea seals

Sit very still 

Wait for the pirates to steal 

blue teal sea seals made from indigo teal sea steel

[ktheqw]

Sea of Love & Loss

Colourful coral the tentacle of a playful octopus Colourful fish

What once was love

Bleached coral The absence of octopuses Bloated fish

What love now remains

In the sea of love and loss where perceptions alter understanding we laugh and cry underwater

[coloradomcpoeticslave]

Drained (Poem #24, NaPoWriMo 2024)

By Daniel Paiz Sometimes you just need to chill out, relax, take a break, because you are drained. Too often these days there’s an obsession with being busy, with being “productive”. If you’re tired, you aren’t always going to create something that turns out how you wanted to. This NaPoWriMo entry is going to dig into this just a little bit. Drained Palest white you’ve ever seen to the point…

[ela-meadows]

Wait

Far down in the sea waits a maiden A maiden of skin so fair Far down in the sea waits a maiden For her hero to venture there

Down under the sea she’s a prisoner Imprisoned by her father’s bane Down under the sea she’s a prisoner Her captor, a monster of fame

On land her hero dwelleth On land he lives his days On land her hero dwelleth Lost without her gaze

He searches for his damsel He searches for his maid He searches for his damsel All his live-long days

To break the spell of evil The monster he must face To break the spell of evil His past must be erased

Poem

Podcast

https://app.aureal.one/episode/2088991

Sometimes I enjoy exploring fantasy concepts through poem. Most often I write short or long stories when playing with fantasy yet here we are. For this work I imagined a young woman and her father traveling by ship over the sea. A great sea monster tears the ship apart killing everyone but the young woman and taking her captive in an underwater air pocket. The young man who shares a mutual infatuation with her longs to rescue her but in order to do so he’ll have to undergo a trial that makes him forget who he is.

Image Description: Three black tropical fish swim above a bed of white and yellow coral. Smaller fish with yellow or yellow and black striped colouring flit about in the background. The water is a bright, tropical blue. Underwater image was taken off the coast of Davao City, Philippines with the Carabao Dive Center.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Some Geology Vocabulary

for your next poem/story (pt. 1)

Abyssal plain - A flat region of the deep ocean floor.

Aeolian - Describes materials formed, eroded, or deposited by or related to the action of wind.

Braided stream - A sediment-clogged stream that forms multiple channels that divide and rejoin.

Colluvium - A general term applied to loose and incoherent deposits, usually at the foot of a slope or cliff and brought there chiefly by gravity.

Conchoidal - Resembling the curve of a conch shell and used to describe a smoothly curved surface on a rock or mineral; characteristic of quartz and obsidian.

Devitrification - Conversion of glass to crystalline material.

Dune - A low mound or ridge of sediment, usually sand, deposited by the wind.

Ephemeral lake - A short-lived lake.

Estuary - The seaward end or tidal mouth of a river where freshwater and seawater mix.

Euhedral - A grain bounded by perfect crystal faces; well-formed.

Fenestral - Having openings or transparent areas in a rock.

Fluvial - Of or pertaining to a river or rivers.

Friable - Describes a rock or mineral that is easily crumbled.

Granoblastic - Describes the texture of a metamorphic rock in which recrystallization formed crystals of nearly the same size in all directions.

Hermatypic - Describes a type of reef-building coral that is incapable of adjusting to conditions lacking sunlight.

Hot spring - A thermal spring whose temperature is above that of the human body.

Isthmus - A narrow strip or neck of land, bordered on both sides by water, connecting two larger land areas.

Lacustrine - Describes a process, feature, or organism pertaining to, produced by, or inhabiting a lake.

Lithify - To change to stone, or to petrify; especially to consolidate from a loose sediment to solid rock.

Lunar tide - The part of the tide caused solely by the tide-producing force of the Moon.

Source

[cannedpickledpeaches]

Sad Poems but I Choose to Interpret Them as Happy

Jade Leech x Reader

“I will love you if I never see you again, and I will love you if I see you every Tuesday. I will love you as the starfish loves a coral reef and as kudzu loves trees, even if the oceans turn to sawdust and the trees fall in the forest without anyone around to hear them . . . . I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms. I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp . . . I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and all the secrets have gone gasping into the world.” -Excerpt from The Beatrice Letters, Lemony Snicket

Jade is not as fickle as his brother, but he too is guilty of interests that come and go like the wind. There are some that stay, like hiking, foraging, and photography; but there are far more that he drops as soon as he’s figured them out. More often than not, his love is not long-lasting.

He has long accepted that any romantic relationship he finds himself in would have a very slim chance of being normal. Healthy. No, his love will likely destroy his partner, whether it is because of obsession or of fleeting interest. He thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to experience it. It would be interesting, a deviation from his norm.

You’re his target, but only because you made such a fascinating proposition. When you’re bored of me, tell me immediately, and we can break up with no hard feelings. Were you such a pragmatic person? He hadn’t noticed before. It spurs him on to know more, to learn everything about you. And once he does, once every single secret you could possibly hide is laid bare before him, he’ll lose interest like he always does and drop you like a bad habit.

So he does. Your favourite food. Colour. Season. The basic things, until they get more specific. The way you do your hair in the mornings. The recipes you favour and the ratio of their ingredients. Your reactions to his occasional unhinged comment. The shows that you laugh or cry at. The ones you think are mediocre. He files them all away in his memory, picking you apart like you’re a subject to study. That’s what he tells himself, anyway. Mild interest. Once he finds out everything, he’ll grow bored and leave.

Days turn to months turn to a year. Has so much time really passed? The secrets you hold have dwindled in number. He knows you inside out, top to bottom, soul to body. There’s only one thing left that he doesn’t know.

You often tease him, asking why he won’t bring you to the Coral Sea. He always gives some shoddy excuse or the other. He isn’t so sure, himself. There’s no real reason to stall. The ice floes have retreated. His parents would be delighted. He would finally know how you’d act in his hometown, in the dark, deep sea that is so different from your home, and with that, he would finally drop you. There will be nothing new.

Unfortunately, I find myself quite busy recently. Perhaps next month. When next month comes around, he pushes it another thirty days. Then another. He was never one to procrastinate, so why now? This is far from efficient. Was he such a cowardly person? He hadn’t known before. He needs to get it done so that he will no longer have a reason to keep you by his side—

Ah. That is the issue, isn’t it?

He doesn’t know how long he’d been in love. All he knows is that he can’t get bored anymore, even if the smile you give him is the same, even if your laughter that warms his chest is unchanging, even if he brings you home. All he knows is that as much as he thought his love would be destructive, he treasures your comfort and happiness too much to think about hurting you anymore. The deadline no longer lies where your last secret is. Forever, until the seas dry up, until he breaths his last gasp—he will love you forever.

[desire-mona]

siiiigh. todd autism headcanons because im projecting.

(using they/he/she pronouns for todd in this post. will explain but also if u dont agree i dont care, tw for alcoholism. time period is vague but autism hasnt existed as a legitimate medical diagnosis for all that long, so keep it in mind i guess.)

- cannot for the life of him stand welton's blankets. so itchy, just thin enough to not warm you up enough but still make you sweat, not long enough to cover your entire body. yes im making the blanket line in their poem about actual blankets, a boy needs to vent somewhere.

- beyond terrible temperature regulation, ALWAYS just a little too hot which is made worse by her sensory issues when it comes to wet fabric. constant slight agony and it never really goes away. theyre about 5 minutes away from crying about how uncomfortable they are at all times.

- had god awful handwriting until high school, like his teachers could BARELY read his handwriting it was Bad. OOOOOH OH MY GOD THERES A TRAIN GOING BY I CAN HEAR IT HONKING this is a really ironic thing to be pointing out rn but its sooooo worth mentioning. its still honking this is fun. 🚂. anyway. her parents made her spend an entire summer fixing her handwriting bc that was like the One thing her teachers criticised. its Fine now but their motor function simply doesn't deliver in the handwriting department.

- had a VERY INTENSE special interest in aquatic life + marine biology growing up, like read every book about any ocean animal in any library intense. his parents eventually forced him to abandon it because its "not a good career focus" but he still perks up when anyone mentions fish. once talked neils ear off about the biodiversity of coral reefs for roughly 2 hours, neil took her to an aquarium for their first date. rip todd anderson you wouldve loved spongebob squarepants.

- looooves pets, namely cats, but they have Too Sweaty hands all the time so any animal fur sticks onto their hands and just feels. so awful.

- had a brief period in his 20s where he was definitely an alcoholic, started as a social drinker but got too addicted to the feeling of not having to adhere to social conventions quite as hard, especially around other drunk ppl. eventually went sober after they realised they just Cant Stand the feeling of a hangover anymore. autistic ppl r more likely to develop a dependency on alcohol if we do start drinking. just btw.

- gets a Pretty Expansive vocabulary after actually starting to pursue literature. sometimes his family lightly teases him about using big words but it confuses the hell out of him. its just a word she thought would apply best!!

- soooooo obsessed with what other ppls idea of them is, both in an anxious way and out of genuine curiosity. would never ask ppl what they think of her bc she thinks thats 1) very broad 2) seems compliment fish-y and 3) just gonna lead to "i think ur great/ nice/ whatever filler compliment." but the dream is to sit someone (neil) down and just ask him every single question possible about how he perceives him.

- asks a billion clarifying questions about anything someone asks him to do, gets anxious about how many questions he's asking, tries to just figure it out, freaks out about the possibility of getting it wrong, ends up doing the thing perfectly. weekly occurrence.

- never fully grasped the appeal of religion (most definitely grew up catholic or christian or Something) just bc she could NOT let the lack of proof go. ALSO not an atheist bc the vastness of space scares them out of it. religious beliefs r a weird topic for them.

- suppresses a good chunk of his stims in public bc One total time someone looked at him weird while he was chewing on a sweatshirt string and he was like i gotta stop NOW. eventually develops tics and has to mask THOSE in public too. dear god someone let this girl unmask. also i started ticcing while writing that bc my body does this great thing where i only tic when im reminded of the concept of ticcing. its great and totally doesnt make me think im faking them (faking for who? dunno bc it usually happens when im alone)

- DOES in fact stim around neil bc NEIL STIMS TOO!!!!!!!! joyous day when they found THAT out! gets vocal stims of random lines from whatever play neil is practicing for. YEAA ART THOU THEEEEREE was a vocal stim for a solid week and a half which made neil VERY excited (autistic neil. how i love u autistic anderperry)

- velcro is The most evil vile disgusting material to ever grace this mortal realm. he hates it more than anything ever and i mean that fully. the feeling of BOTH sides, the noise, how easily it comes apart, she hates it all.

this is the gender part

never really viewed gender and gender roles as anything to adhere to beyond the fear of punishment if they dont. finds any social convention relating to gender to be Really dumb and meaningless, bc gender isn't (scientifically) real in any capacity, so why treat it like that? for the longest time just shrugged and said "eh, i guess im a boy" bc thats what she was used to being told, and didn't feel particularly drawn to agree OR disagree. eventually realised on a late night that Wait. i dont Actually care what i am. like yeah im a Male i guess but also im just me. my brain doesnt have a gender and i basically am my brain, right? and then never really thought about it again because that's genuinely how little he cares. adhering the most to canon with that mindset, she never really tells anyone (for obvious reasons on top of the overall apathy) and just lets the he/him happen to her but. in my dream world? agender they/he/she todd anderson. and this is MY blog so those are the pronouns im using from now on. i will forever love talking abt how autistic ppl very often view gender differently than allistic ppl, will forever love talking abt how autistic ppl are more likely to be trans. autism!!!

also yes that entire paragraph is just my view of gender, change the pronouns and the todd mentions and its just me. what of it.

[ausp-ice]

My entries for the shallows part of the esk marine event! This time with Iso, Auraeum, and VaalbaraCreeps's Professor. 

I have little poems for each entry as well:

Intro: Land and Sea

I bring a friend down to the shore feeling the pull of something more. We gaze upon a box, a coral, a stone, each of them quite far from home.

As we muse upon what we should do A familiar face emerges from the blue: "Iso? My friend, it's good to see you again. Who is that with you? Another friend?"

"Professor," I greet, and I would smile if I could, "Yes, this is Auraeum. A dear friend of mine," I assure. "A pleasure, Professor," Auraeum greets. "Were you too brought here, to where land meets sea?"

"It was not just me, then," Professor muses. "Perhaps the ocean has something to show us." "Then shall we go together?" I suggest. "It would be my pleasure," he answers, and so we begin our quest.

Chapter 1: Reef

The three of us dive into the sea taking the coral towards where it should be. Auraeum carries the coral, bearing it with their mind As Professor leads the way to a reef full of life.

We return the coral to the community from which it came and the ocean seems to murmur, welcome back, friend. But before we go further, something else catches my eye: An anchor, out of place among the algae where it lies.

"This does not belong here," Auraeum says, following my gaze. "Its home is in another place." We decide to take it with us; into Auraeum's grasp it goes As we go further into the ocean's flows.

Chapter 2: Shipwreck

We find a shipwreck, lost to sea and time I explore it, curious about what we would find. Professor is graceful in the water, scouring water-worn nooks, While I poke my head in all sorts of places to look.

"There," Auraeum says, directing our eyes to a place that seemed perfect to settle our prize. But before they could come near to place it there A cleaner shrimp emerged from thin air.

—Or water, perhaps, would be better to say.

Nonetheless, when I gently nudge it aside to make space, and Auraeum settles the anchor in place, Instead of fleeing, it clings to my fur. "Well," I say. "I seem to have a new passenger."

Chapter 3: Symbiosis

I had learned of cleaner shrimp in a different life; how fascinating they were, and such a delight. I ask if we should bring it to others of its kind, and Auraeum says, "Why not? Let us see what we find."

Professor speaks: "I have seen them before." And he says, "I know where to go." We follow again, an adventure in the sea And approach an undersea crag where the shrimp should be.

The shrimp are there, among the rocks, true— But what catches my eye is an eel that comes into view. My passenger seems excited, so I draw close; the shrimp leaps off, and down it floats

Into the waiting jaws of a predator but the one eating is not the eel, but the cleaner. It's amazing to see, this connection across creatures and I wonder if the ocean, today, was our teacher.

A spark alights in the waters, bright and beckons us to return to the above light. "Shall we?" Auraeum asks, and so we go with the shrimp's antennae waving goodbyes below.

[fatehbaz]

Coral today is an icon of environmental crisis, its disappearance from the world’s oceans an emblem for the richness of forms and habitats either lost to us or at risk. Yet, as Michelle Currie Navakas shows in her eloquent book, Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America, our accounts today of coral as beauty, loss, and precarious future depend on an inherited language from the nineteenth century. [...] Navakas traces how coral became the material with which writers, poets, and artists debated community, labor, and polity in the United States.

The coral reef produced a compelling teleological vision of the nation: just as the minute coral “insect,” working invisibly under the waves, built immense structures that accumulated through efforts of countless others, living and dead, so the nation’s developing form depended on the countless workers whose individuality was almost impossible to detect. This identification of coral with human communities, Navakas shows, was not only revisited but also revised and challenged throughout the century. Coral had a global biography, a history as currency and ornament that linked it to the violence of slavery. It was also already a talisman - readymade for a modern symbol [...]. Not least, for nineteenth-century readers in the United States, it was also an artifact of knowledge and discovery, with coral fans and branches brought back from the Pacific and Indian Oceans to sit in American parlors and museums. [...]

---

[W]ith material culture analysis, [...] [there are] three common early American coral artifacts, familiar objects that made coral as a substance much more familiar to the nineteenth century than today: red coral beads for jewelry, the coral teething toy, and the natural history specimen. This chapter is a visual tour de force, bringing together a fascinating range of representations of coral in nineteenth-century painting and sculptures.

With the material presence of coral firmly in place, Navakas returns us to its place in texts as metaphor for labor, with close readings of poetry and ephemeral literature up to the Civil War era. [...] [Navakas] includes an intriguing examination of the posthumous reputation of the eighteenth-century French naturalist Jean-André Peyssonnel who first claimed that coral should be classed as an animal (or “insect”), not plant. Navakas then [...] considers white reformers, both male and female, and Black authors and activists, including James McCune Smith and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and a singular Black charitable association in Cleveland, Ohio, at the end of the century, called the Coral Builders’ Society. [...]

---

Most strikingly, her attention to layered knowledge allows her to examine the subversions of coral imagery that arose [...]. Obviously, the mid-nineteenth-century poems that lauded coral as a metaphor for laboring men who raised solid structures for a collective future also sought to naturalize a system that kept some kinds of labor and some kinds of people firmly pressed beneath the surface. Coral’s biography, she notes, was “inseparable from colonial violence at almost every turn” (p. 7). Yet coral was also part of the material history of the Black Atlantic: red coral beads were currency [...].

Thus, a children’s Christmas story, “The Story of a Coral Bracelet” (1861), written by a West Indian writer, Sophy Moody, described the coral trade in the structure of a slave narrative. [...] In addition, coral’s protean shapes and ambiguity - rock, plant, or animal? - gave Americans a model for the difficulty of defining essential qualities from surface appearance, a message that troubled biological essentialists but attracted abolitionists. Navakas thus repeatedly brings into view the racialized and gendered meanings of coral [...].

---

Some readers from the blue humanities will want more attention, for example, to [...] different oceans [...]: Navakas’s gaze is clearly eastward to the Atlantic and Mediterranean and (to a degree) to the Caribbean. Many of her sources keep her to the northern and southeastern United States and its vision of America, even though much of the natural historical explorations, not to mention the missionary interest in coral islands, turns decidedly to the Pacific. [...] First, under my hat as a historian of science, I note [...] [that] [q]uestions about the structure of coral islands among naturalists for the rest of the century pitted supporters of Darwinian evolutionary theory against his opponents [...]. These disputes surely sustained the liveliness of coral - its teleology and its ambiguities - in popular American literature. [...]

My second desire, from the standpoint of Victorian studies, is for a more specific account of religious traditions and coral. While Navakas identifies many writers of coral poetry and fables, both British and American, as “evangelical,” she avoids detailed analysis of the theological context that would be relevant, such as the millennial fascination with chaos and reconstruction and the intense Anglo-American missionary interest in the Pacific. [...] [However] reasons for this move are quickly apparent. First, her focus on coral as an icon that enabled explicit discussion of labor and community means that she takes the more familiar arguments connecting natural history and Christianity in this period as a given. [...] Coral, she argues, is most significant as an object of/in translation, mediating across the Black Atlantic and between many particular cultures. These critical strategies are easy to understand and accept, and yet the word - the script, in her terms - that I kept waiting for her to take up was “monuments”: a favorite nineteenth-century description of coral.

Navakas does often refer to the awareness of coral “temporalities” - how coral served as metaphor for the bridges between past, present, and future. Yet the way that a coral reef was understood as a literal graveyard, in an age that made death practices and new forms of cemeteries so vital a part of social and civic bonds, seems to deserve a place in this study. These are a greedy reader’s questions, wanting more. As Navakas notes in a thoughtful coda, the method of the environmental humanities is to understand our present circumstances as framed by legacies from the past, legacies that are never smooth but point us to friction and complexity.

---

All text above by: Katharine Anderson. "Review of Navakas, Michele Currie, Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America." H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. December 2023. Published at: [networks.h-net.org/group/reviews/20017692/anderson-navakas-coral-lives-literature-labor-and-making-america] [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

[khaire-traveler]

The gods' beauty matches their domains, meaning they're far more gorgeous than we can imagine.

Aphrodite rivals the beauty of the sun setting over an ocean's horizon as you stand on the shore, the water tickling your feet as it pulled in and pushed back out repeatedly by the waves. Poseidon exceeds the beauty found deep within the ocean's waters, from vibrantly colored coral reefs to the very denizens that live within the seas - he's more beautiful than them all. Apollo surpasses the beauty of the morning light cast through your curtains by the rising sun, of the songs that send chills throughout your body and tears to your eyes, of even the most intricately crafted poems with passion and emotion stamped on to each letter. Hermes glows radiantly with beauty that extends past the feeling of freedom when you ride a bicycle without help for the first time, or the feelings of awe and wonder you experienced on your first trip away from home, or that feeling of wholeness when you watch a smile take shape on someone else's face because of something you said or did.

The gods are more beautiful than the very domains they preside over. Their beauty cannot be put into mere human words. To describe them is to underestimate the sheer potency of their beauty. But I hope I've at least been able to put some of it into perspective.

[rabbitrah]

What are your favorite poems from when you were a kid, or that you think 10-11 year olds would enjoy?

I don't have much time outside the regular curriculum to teach poetry, but my rough plan is to try and pull out a poem every now and then, maybe with snacks as well, and have it be more of a fun, low-risk "poetry tasting" at the beginning or end of a lesson.

I'm interested in genuinely good English or Spanish language poetry without much archaic language. Whether it's sad, happy, serious, dark, funny, whatever is fine. Hopefully I can have a nice balance.

Top choices right now:

Invitation by Shel Silverstein

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

This Bus Stop Was A Coral Reef, Once by Megan Arkenberg

The Orange by Wendy Cope

Poet to a Bigot by Langston Hughes

Cause I Ain't Got a Pencil by Joshua T. Dickerson

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

I am Considering

Two-Headed Calf Poem by Laura Gilpin

The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service (I was obsessed with this one as a kid.)

[reeffairy]

Turn me into a jelly belly jellyfish

Turn me into a jelly belly jellyfish

At the blue sea algea fields

Lay belly up blue sea seals 

When the tide fills 

The blue sea seals turn to see

The wild jelly belly jellyfish 

Fill up on the glowing blue sea algea jelly

They feast and feed 

Full of glowing blue sea Algea jelly

Jelly belly jellyfish 

Feeding on glowing blue sea algea jelly

Turn me into a jelly belly full of blue sea algea jelly 

Swimming with a full blue belly sea seals

In the deep blue sea

Where the glowing blue sea algea jelly fields grow 

[stardust-swan]

How to Be a Real Life Mermaid 🌊🧜‍♀️🐚

The Look

🐚 Wear sea foam green, aquamarine, teal, ocean blue, soft grey, lilac, periwinkle, emerald, pale gold, white, deep blue, and turquoise

🐚 Pick flowy fabrics such as taffeta, chiffon, linen, silk, muslin, and sequined fabrics that resemble fish scales

🐚 Choose garments like maxi dresses, flowy skirts, bandeau off-the-shoulder tops, tank tops, soft scarves used as tops, shell clutches, woven bags, and pretty beaded sandals

🐚 Accessorise with jewellery made from pearls, sea glass, seashells, turquoise, aquamarine, opals, gold that resembles the sun glinting on the sea, and silver that reminds one of the metallic sheen of fish scales. Examples of accessories you can wear are bangles, anklets, layered necklaces, and pearl earrings

🐚 Makeup Ideas: eyeshadow in nudes like a sandy beach, greens and blues like the sea, or lavender and pink like a coral reef, shimmery highlight, dewy skin, coral pink lipstick, and seashell pink lipgloss

🐚 Hair Ideas: loose curls that look like ocean waves, fishtail plaits, green and blue hair dye, pearl hairclips, and sea salt hairspray. Brush your hair with a pretty wide-tooth comb.

The Lifestyle

🐚 Listen to songs such as Martha's Harbour by All About Eve, No Ordinary Love by Sade, Come Into the Water by Mitski, Pearl Diver by Mitski, Mariners Apartment Complex by Lana Del Rey, and Call of the Sea by Claudie Mackula (a longer mermaid playlist is here).

🐚 You can also listen to the sounds of the ocean, like whale song or waves crashing on the beach

🐚 Watch movies and TV shows such as Aquamarine, Splash, The Little Mermaid, H20: Just Add Water, Mr Peabody and the Mermaid, Miranda (1948), Mermaid Melody Pitchi Pitchi, Ponyo, Barbie in a Mermaid Tale, Barbie: The Pearl Princess, Neptune's Daughter (1914), A Daughter of the Gods (1916), Queen of the Sea (1918), Venus of the South Seas (1924), and Magic Island (1995)

🐚 Read books, fairytales, and poems such as The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, The Mermaid Handbook by Carolyn Turgeon, Mermaids: The Myths, Legends, and Lore by Skye Alexander, A Daughter of the Sea by Amy Le Feuvre, Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, The Mermaid by Alfred Lord Tennyson, and The Sea-Child by Katherine Mansfield

🐚 Mermaids are renowned for their beautiful siren song, so sing sweetly and brightly as often as you feel like it

🐚 Make your self smell like the ocean by using a deodorant like Old Spice Deep Sea, and perfumes like L by Lolita Lempicka, Acqua di Gioia, Salt Air by Skylar, Fleur de Corail by Lolita Lempicka, Seahorse by Zoologist, Nymphéas by Kismet Olfactive, Salina by Laborattorio Olfattivo, Alien Mirage by Mugler, Very Sexy Sea by Victoria's Secret, 20,000 Flowers Under the Sea by Tokyomilk, Nebbia Spessa by Filippo Sorcinelli, Tiziana Terenzi's Sea Stars Collection, Chant d'Extase by Nina Ricci, Sirena by Floris, Squid by Zoologist, and Orto Parisi Megamare (be aware that the latter two suit a dark siren who lures men to their deaths more than a sweet mermaid princess).

🐚 Make your home smell like the deep sea too, with sea salt scented diffusers and candles such as Yankee Candle Sea Minerals, Yankee Candle Seaside Woods, or Jo Malone Wood Sage and Sea Salt

🐚 Home Decor Ideas: silk sheets in blue, grey, and sea green, seashell jewellery trays, homemade terrariums, jellyfish embroidery, seashell candles, beaded curtains made from string and shells, paintings of maritime scenes, glass vases filled with layers of sand, seashells, and faux pearls, seashell shaped soap dishes, rattan furniture, woven baskets, treasure chests to keep your valuables in, mermaid figurines, a seashell or jellyfish mobile, a bowl filled with seashells, a glass bottle filled with ocean water or with a love letter inside to replicate a message in a bottle, mosaics with marine motifs like seahorses and shells, even an aquarium with colourful fish if you are able to care for them

🐚 Spend lots of time around near bodies of water, swimming in it to connect with your inner mermaid, or just walking in it and feeling the sand beneath your feet

🐚 Collect seashells and pretty pieces of sea glass thar wash up on the shore

🐚 Watch synchronised swimming, or even learn it yourself

🐚 Go diving, snorkeling, or mermaiding

🐚 Visit aquariums to see beautiful exotic fish and learn more about the ocean

🐚 Do your best to be sustainable; make the world a cleaner place for your fishy friends to live in. If possible, attend a beach clean-up group local to your area to help pick up litter

🐚 Carry a haircomb and hand mirror with you at all times (you can hotglue seashells and faux pearls on the back of the mirror to make it even more like a mermaid's treasure)

🐚 Watch documentaries and read books on the ocean, marine life, and nautical myths and legends

🐚 Enjoy snacking on seaweed soup, coconut water, and Guylian seashell chocolates

🐚 Take luxurious baths with dead sea salt, seaweed masks, small white bath bombs that resemble pearls, a coconut scented candle, and calming music

[serenitypoetry]

i am

i am an empty plastic box,

a crucial part of a design.

i am a drop of paint on canvas

that was meant to be left white.

i am a dying branch of coral

in a dying coral reef.

i am a living, breathing, single-celled

abomination freak.

i am the product of a poet's

several days of unpaid work.

i am a suicidal remnant of

the times i tried to hurt.

i am a writhing, half-dead bug

on an unfinished block of wood.

i am a horrid little blemish on

a floor otherwise good.

i am forgotten in the corner

of a shelf been painted over.

i am a rock inside the shoe

of whoever launched the rover.

i am a single grain of sand

among the sand that lines the beach.

i am the villain of the object

lesson that you always preach.

i am a fish that has been caught

inside a big, torrential storm.

i am a freezing alley cat

and i am begging to be warm.

i am horrid and disgusting,

and my worth i will deny.

i am positively ugly

and my scars i'll look to hide.

i am the ghost of all the things

that i can say i used to be.

i am grown up into the silhouette

of what i used to need.

i'm a forgotten line of code

that, when removed, breaks everything.

i am a dying NICU patient

who's forgotten how to breathe.

i am looking to the future

and i'm hiding from the past.

i am a modern electronic

and i wasn't built to last.

i am everything i say that

i've forgotten i could be.

i am nothing in this poem,

i am resolutely me.

[everydayoriginal]

The Coral Fairy by Dianita

This painting is based on Lorraine Schein’s poem with the same title. It was commissioned by the staff of Mermaids Monthly e-zine to be their April 2021 cover.

My art director was Meg Frank, they wished to have a softer color palette for this cover. We chose pastel colors which added a different feel to this illustration next to the other amazing covers published at the time.

When I read the poem, I thought of lack of sun since this fairy is part of a coral reef and can’t swim like other mermaids. The idea of her skin color came from my Mom, who has vitiligo since she was young. She couldn’t be in the sun for long periods of time, being cautious of the sensitive nature of her skin. It all played well since coral is also sensitive and can bleach if it’s touched or hurt in any way.

All I remember from painting this piece was the amazing images I had to look at for reference. I looked for coral reefs in Quintana Roo, Mexico to add a hint of the beauty from my country. Then, I found photos of other coral reefs in the world and I couldn’t help but to feel marveled. The beauty that exists in this world can’t be expressed with words!

It was so fun to paint the red coral and the fish going around. And to imagine her little big world where she lives and thrives. It also reminds me to the feeling when we stop looking around to find peace and happiness. We become whole when we realize the power and love that exist within us. I wouldn’t trap drowning people to make them my companions, but you get what I mean, right?

You can read Lorraine Schein’s poem in the Mermaids Monthly archive: https://mermaidsmonthly.com/2021/04/20/the-coral-fairy/

Artwork details

Oils on panel. Varnished with gloss varnish. Created in 2021.

This painting measures 12in x 16in.  It includes a thin frame with bronze details with an approximate total size of 13 x 17in. Comes ready to hang.

Colors might show differently in your devices.

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Customers that live outside the U.S.A might be subject to custom fees. Like E.U’s VAT. Please, note that you will be responsible of paying this fee to receive this package in your country.

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[ammg-old2]

The ocean off the coast of southern Florida is having a long, hot summer. For weeks, surface temperatures hovered around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, before dropping to the 80s last week. The world’s third-largest barrier reef is dying, and scientists are fishing out coral samples and bringing them to the cool safety of laboratory tanks. One spot along the coastline hit triple-digit temperatures last month, conditions you would expect inside a hot tub. Some coastal Floridians skipped their usual dips in the ocean because it didn’t seem appealing anymore.

Marine heat waves—periods of persistent and anomalously high temperatures of surface seawater—have materialized in other parts of the world too. The surface temperatures of about 44 percent of Earth’s oceans are currently experiencing extreme heat, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some of that warming is to be expected, because 2023 is an El Niño year. But “all of these marine heat waves are made warmer because of climate change,” Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at NOAA’s Physical Sciences Laboratory, told me. June was already a record-breaking month for the world’s oceans, and then July came along and topped it. According to the experimental forecast system that Amaya and his colleagues run at NOAA, half of the world’s oceans may be in the throes of a heat wave by September.

Earth is an ocean planet, a water world. We have not observed anything like it yet in the universe, not even with our best telescopes, and so we cannot know exactly how rare—and thus, how difficult—it may be for the forces of cosmic nature to produce such a thing. And yet, here we are, simmering its oceans at our peril and changing the fundamental makeup of the ecosystem that defines Earth. Our oceans have absorbed most of the excess heat produced by greenhouse-gas emissions in recent decades, serving as a buffer that protects us from the worst effects of climate change. Humans may be sweltering on land this summer, but our planet’s future—and therefore ours—is intimately tied with the sea.

Astronomers have spent years searching for worlds beyond our solar system that might host oceans, in the hopes that they also host life. Of the more than 5,000 planets they’ve found, only a few are in the habitable zone—at the right distance from their star to be conducive to liquid, flowing water. And scientists have yet to confirm that any rocky, Earth-size planets are also wet. Part of the problem is that oceans are difficult to detect with the technology available to researchers today. Our planet may be slick with rolling seas, but “if we were to observe Earth as an exoplanet, from a different system, we could not measure that Earth has water,” Charles Cadieux, an astronomer at the University of Montreal, told me.

Other oceans exist in our very own solar system but are hidden beneath the surface of icy moons, their exact composition unknown to us. Krista Soderlund, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, studies Europa, a moon of Jupiter with a salty subsurface ocean that could harbor microbial life; she spends her days marveling at this other ocean world, all while worrying about the one she lives on. “I don’t really have a way to reconcile that,” Soderlund told me. “You can see the short, rapid changes right now, and then I’m looking forward to how that’s going to affect my kids. How much worse is it going to be?”

Next year, NASA is scheduled to launch the mission that Soderlund is working on: a spacecraft that will reach Europa in 2030. The vessel will carry a plaque engraved with a poem written by the U.S. poet laureate, which reads in part, “O second moon, we, too, are made / of water, of vast and beckoning seas.” This idea of connection, a touch of intimacy in an unfamiliar cosmos, is lovely. Read another way, it sounds almost like an elegy. We are made of vast seas. But when those seas are superheated, dissolving the shells and skeletons of marine creatures and enabling toxic blooms of algae, they beg for relief more than they beckon.

Our planet did not start out with seas. They came later, after Earth had cooled down from its formative molten years. How Earth got its water remains an open question; some researchers believe that it arrived inside asteroids that bombarded Earth several billion years ago, while others suggest that it was locked within the planet since it first formed out of the mountain-size rocks whizzing around the early solar system. This September, a NASA spacecraft will bring home samples from an asteroid that has remained unchanged since that cosmic period, and the rocky bits and pieces could reveal crucial information about our very existence. Scientists hope to uncover clues about the forces that gave rise to Earth’s oceans and enriched them with the chemical compounds that eventually sparked life.

In the face of climate change, the thrill of discovery is tinged with melancholy; as we learn more about how our ocean planet came to be, we’re subjecting its waters to intense heat, and the entire planet is facing the consequences. Hot oceans are melting ice sheets, intensifying hurricanes, and devastating fishing industries. “The Earth has seen a lot of change in its life,” Karen St. Germain, the director of NASA’s Earth-science division, told me. “But we are driving it now in a way that it hasn’t been driven before.”

Astronomers refer to the habitable region around a star as the Goldilocks zone. There, conditions are not too hot and not too cold, but just right for water to lap on alien shores. Earth is squarely in our sun’s habitable zone, and will enjoy its pleasant perch for at least another few billion years, until the sun grows hot enough to truly boil the planet’s oceans away. But Earth may become unlivable long before that: floods, droughts, wildfires, days so hot that touching asphalt can severely burn your skin, hot-tub seas that can roil coral and humans alike.

Last week, the head of the United Nations said, “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” Climate scientists have cautioned that global boiling is not a scientific term, and that our current spate of extreme weather has been predicted for years. This is global warming, they say, and it’s plenty dramatic. Still, boiling can help emphasize the visceral urgency of what’s happening in the water. Because it is getting more difficult each day to look around and feel that things here are just right.