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.