John Blight: Plankton

I have watched plankton over reefs float by
in rivers wide as seas that strained belief;
but, most, the shapes so intimate that I
could think that children drew them. Sheaf on sheaf
of comic drawings, unspoiled primitives
that couldn't live, yet represented lives
so simply limned; and, yet, seen here alive
too difficult to understand, so make-believe
and yet alive. Have you seen plankton float,
barely an outline round transparent space?
It can here represent whatever crayons trace
extravagantly wild. No nature note
has chronicled such shapes. Only a child's quick mind
has realised this life so naively designed.


Published in the 1960s. Blight was a Queensland poet who liked to squeeze his beachcombing thoughts into sonnet form - his sonnet-writing eventually became obsessive. This isn't a good poem: the central conceit is too laboured to come alive. Still, a plankton poem!