The Turn

At first

they seem many fish.

Thousands of silver threads

stitched loosely through the harbor,

each with its own hunger,

its own clear eye.

Then a shadow passes.

No sound

breaks the water.

One body turns—

no more than a fin’s width—

and the harbor

remembers

how to be one.

As if sunlight

had found

another way to speak,

the water

lifts

into a sudden arc

of silver.

Then stillness.

Watching them,

I wonder how often we mistake ourselves

for solitary creatures.

We may have always lived this way—

how quickly kindness travels

once seen,

how easily cruelty spreads

when no one turns

to notice,

how fear moves first,

and courage follows,

and love—when someone dares to turn—

can run through a life

with startling speed.

The silversides

will never be famous.

No one comes to the harbor

for their brief flash.

They come for bass,

for seals,

for terns.

Yet remove these near-invisible lives

and the bass thin,

the terns wheel hungry,

the harbor forgets

its old music.

Perhaps this is enough:

to be the unseen thread

that holds the cloth together,

to spend a life

feeding beauty

we may never witness.

Still, each bright turn they make

is not a gesture but a survival—

a single body tipping,

then a thousand bodies following,

until the water itself

becomes a blade of light

cutting through the dark harbor,

and for a breathless moment

the world is held together

by nothing but motion and trust.