by Julia Griffin

“‘Every square inch is covered in life’: the ageing oil rigs that became marine oases”
—The Guardian

Think of the prospects of the ageing rig,
Abandoned in the middle of the sea,
So bare, so gray, so jagged, and so big,
Unwanted even for its former work
Of sucking out the ocean’s muck and murk
To blight the air and doom posterity:

Whoever would have dreamed a thing so dead,
Activists’ ghoul, Big Oil’s discarded toy,
Could bloom into a grove, a busy bed
Of waving tendrils, colored like the dawn,
Where mollusks sprout and cod and rockfish spawn,
And young sea lions soar like shots of joy?