Portfolios > Poems from Living Here over 40 years

Enabling The Poetry Of The Ladder 
The fish  charge fiercely yet gracefully upstream.

The fish ladder waits for spring to come
so it can come alive again.
The urge to spawn brings them,
drives them to quiet places where

each female lays 100,000 eggs,
which the attending males will fertilize.
Some eggs get eaten,
some hatch and begin their tenuous lives.

Leaving the young to fend for themselves, 
the spent adults will then return to the sea. 

There they feed again on krill and plankton
eluding predators as they can,

so they may return next year to breed again.