Mangroves

Rising and falling, the tides fill and empty 

the mangroves’ thickety baskets, their salty weave 

holding fishes like secrets. At Holy Spirit Bay 

evening spreads her silver nets. I imagine Christ 

walking among the mangroves, floating through 

dense tanglements to speak parables equipping 

the mangrove roots—his woody flesh the church— 

to stand in storms, feed life in the seas. 

Stars glimmer awake. He calls them by name: Ruby, 

Lucia, Wynken, addressing them with affection, 

those pulsing diamond bodies he flung 

from his musical fingers into space. And so 

they sing. But maybe the parable is, be silent 

like the moon, like oysters breathing in the dark 

making pearls.