Ocean Ambassador, Sylvia Earle
—1979 Jim Suit Descent
Ten years after Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong
walked a new world above, Sylvia Earle descended
1250 feet to the ocean floor.
She wore a pressurized fiberglass suit, tethered
to a submersible only by a communication line.
Off the island of Oahu twelve-foot corals grew,
lit up in blue bioluminescence when touched,
like streetlamps at dusk, lighting one after another.
Orange, yellow, blue, and red crabs
hung from the coral like laundry.
Above, sun’s faint glow still visible,
sea worms burrowed in sand beneath her feet
and eels wrapped around the coral’s base.
Earle explored at a depth
where no human had ever been.
Look up at the sky's moon
and think Armstrong, Aldrin.
Think Earle when you see the ocean, imagine its depths —
a no man's land
where a woman was first.
—1979 Jim Suit Descent
Ten years after Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong
walked a new world above, Sylvia Earle descended
1250 feet to the ocean floor.
She wore a pressurized fiberglass suit, tethered
to a submersible only by a communication line.
Off the island of Oahu twelve-foot corals grew,
lit up in blue bioluminescence when touched,
like streetlamps at dusk, lighting one after another.
Orange, yellow, blue, and red crabs
hung from the coral like laundry.
Above, sun’s faint glow still visible,
sea worms burrowed in sand beneath her feet
and eels wrapped around the coral’s base.
Earle explored at a depth
where no human had ever been.
Look up at the sky's moon
and think Armstrong, Aldrin.
Think Earle when you see the ocean, imagine its depths —
a no man's land
where a woman was first.
Wendy Patrice Williams is a writer, educator, and poet with two chapbooks, Some New Forgetting and Bayley House Bard. She has been a member of the Red Fox Underground Poets of the Sierra Foothills for over ten years. Some of her poems have appeared in Rattlesnake Review, Song of the San Joaquin Quarterly, Late Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets, Sacramento Voices 2013, 2014 and 2015, Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis, and Common Ground Review. Wendy is a board member of the Sacramento Poetry Center and hosts a first-Monday monthly reading of word luminaries. Cold River Press is publishing her book In Chaparral: Life on the Georgetown Divide, California this May, 2016—her first poetry collection with a spine!