Best Bioluminescence Poems
Tropical, ocean tides, that flow and seek
Blue sea sparkles resplendent with foam peaks
Soft music strums, magicked the stars delight
To shimmer and wink in the sky, so bright
In to the water, a fisherman falls
Death stalked and beckoned to the coral halls
Sweet Olookaylani, you came for me
Siren mermaid, sleek, glorious beauty
I muse in you, my love, do you hear me?
Ukulele sounds drift enchantingly
Are you the light that flashes yes, I sea
Sweet Olookaylani, come back for me
Moon glows, bioluminescence, salt sprays
Love longs, warm breezes, blow kisses your way
Entered in “Beautiful Sonnet Contest”
Sponsor: William Kekaula
Placed 7th
Off the forest trails, where bushwhackers stray,
Restless Mary ducked branches, left her screen that day.
She was startled when a Horned owl flew
A dragonfly landed on her sleeve; its color was blue.
Braided ivy above made darkness at noon
She tripped over a log, saw a glowing mushroom,
It lit up her face, its color was blue,
In that quiet place, her wonder grew
She knelt down low, with eyes open wide,
It looked other-worldly by the mossy rock side.
Lit up with an ethereal light,
Not like her tablet, more like elvish night.
She told her dad it was magic; he looked it up on his phone
Then he took on a pedagogical tone
"Just a chemical reaction, many mushrooms glow"
But Mary preferred magic, didn't want to know.
"It's OK" said her dad, "science is magic too:
"But mushrooms glow green, they never glow blue
"There must be a reason, maybe slanted light by a tree"
Mary said, "I'm ten years old, and I trust what I see."
"I'll go with you" said her dad, "let's explore:
"We'll search your path on the forest floor."
Mary said "not sure I can retrace
"I don't know what I did, how I got to that place."
They walked anyway, it was a beautiful day
They trod pine needle carpets, pushed ivy away
They got to a clearing with shade all around
Sat on a log, Mary felt content, Dad unwound.
He felt a lift to his attitude
His troubles let go, his spirit renewed.
He brushed a leaf and a drooping fern frond.
Parent and child felt a stronger bond.
Was it real? who can be sure?
But the little girl knows both moments felt pure
She'll always remember brown soil among pine
And that glowing blue mushroom, a light almost divine.
Maybe somewhere a new species caused by random mutation
Was added to the variety of all creation.
Science seemed magic, and nature was art
Its moments like this that engrave in our heart.
Where the canopy breaks and the sunlight is spun,
Into threads of a liquid and crystalline gold,
A new pulse has started, a life has begun,
In a shape that the chronicles never have told.
Not animal, fungus, nor blossom of earth,
But a synthesis born of the silica’s grace;
The Vitreosolen has taken its birth,
The first of a strange and a shimmering race.
It stands on a tripod of translucent bone,
Like pillars of glass that have frozen in flight,
With a skin like the surface of water, alone,
That captures and fractures the passing of light.
No mouth for the tearing, no eyes for the glare,
But a crown of fine filaments, amber and thin,
That drink in the static and weight of the air,
To power the chemical engine within.
Its "leaves" are like mirrors, rotating and slow,
To follow the path of the violet rays,
While deep in its center, a soft, indigo glow
Beats with the rhythm of planetary days.
It leaves not a footprint, but trails of a mist
That smells of the ozone and wild, mountain mint,
A creature of prisms the morning has kissed,
With a body of diamond and celestial tint.
It hums with a frequency, hollow and deep,
A song that vibrates through the roots of the pines,
Waking the mountains from eons of sleep,
With its glowing and intricate, geometric lines.
The Ouro has landed, the Vitreosolen,
A bridge between mineral, spirit, and cell;
A gift from a future that’s not yet been stolen,
Comes to the garden where miracles dwell.
The tides have grown heavy with secrets and oil,
And the coral is ghost-white and brittle as bone.
Where once there were thousands in glittering coil,
Now the deep-reaching current is silent and lone.
The last living spark of a sapphire sun,
A relic, a myth, a forgotten medallion,
In a world where the legends are all but undone.
Her scales are not jewels, but dull, tarnished pewter,
Scoured by sand and the sting of the grey.
The songs of her sisters grow softer and muter,
Dissolving like foam in the wake of the day.
She remembers the bioluminescent dances,
The pressure of hands in the dark, cooling vents,
But now, only shadows and cold, empty trances
Remain of the kingdom’s magnificent tents.
She rises to surface where moonlight is fractured,
By nets made of nylon and islands of glass.
The air is a flavor her lungs never captured,
As she watches the iron-hulled leviathans pass.
No sailor is singing, no lookout is dreaming,
They stare at their screens while the radar pings slow,
Missing the flash of the tail that is gleaming
A final, faint pulse in the dark down below.
She dives one last time to the floor of the trench,
Where the weight of the water is steady and kind,
Away from the heat and the iron-wrought stench,
Leaving the sun and the wreckage behind.
A sigh of silver, a bubble, a quiver—
The ocean accepts what the land couldn't keep.
The last of the magic, a cold, quiet shiver,
As the heart of the sea falls forever to sleep.
And she cries.
(“Feed Your Head Merit Badge”, 2011, original oil
"Conceived in Light", 2017, original encaustic)
Under the harvest Luna
Big and bright and silver
With the hunger
Of all humanity
We stuff and stuff
On magic spores
Until we’ve had enough
To remain in light
And when our belly’s burst
We split our sides
Released in time’s collapse
And wash upon the shore
Wave by wave
Of primal particles
Spread out in films
Of bioluminescence
Dancing in the night
Until the golden
Dawning Sol
Revives us
With His sight
(1/18/26)
moonlight falls
silent on snow
frozen towering wild turns its face to ancient sea
the ocean, brooding, darkly gazes back
waves crash on rock
ink upon the shore
beneath the endless starry surface
a world of light and wonder
fall and float among the luminescence
down
down
the kingdom of giants wide awake
among deep time and eons
majestic sirens of the fathoms
call to their kin across the stars
Titan, Ceres, Europa, Earth
sisters, cetaceans, sing
Antarctic abyss keeps its secrets
hidden since creation
epoch after epoch
as it was in the beginning
is now
and ever shall be... until
we meet amongst the midnight
in distant days ahead
In those dark eras of the split, to live was to be alone,
A calculated isolation chilling to the bone.
They hid inside their separate pits and hoarded what they kept,
While just beyond the blast-doors, all their starving neighbors wept.
Lysander watched a nearby vault collapse into the grime,
Their priceless banks of ancient seeds destroyed by mold and time,
Because they lacked the synthesis, the codes to make them grow,
Held by a hostile bunker just a thousand yards below.
They traded only in their scars and deep, ancestral dread,
A territorial madness that infected every bed.
The mind locked in a cage of concrete learns to hate the dark,
But hates the neighbor even more who carries still a spark.
Lysander saw the rot was not a scarcity of bread,
But the absolute division of the living from the dead.
The lonely mind was screaming out behind a wall of stone,
And so he took the broken blueprints time had left alone.
He did not build with iron wire, he did not work with brass,
For metal was the weapon of the executioner class.
Instead, he grew a softer thing along the dripping wall:
A bioluminescent moss that answered to his call.
A fibrous, pale conductor made of cellular design,
That mimicked how the brain-waves spark along a living line.
A living loom of emerald wool, a bright, organic lace,
To knit the fractured pieces of a broken species' face.
For twelve long years he labored there, a surgeon in the night,
He harvested his cortex for the seeds of golden light.
He took microscopic biopsies from his own thinking brain,
And spliced them into mossy veins to cultivate the strain.
He became the anchor node, the root within the deep,
And when he lay his crooked spine down on the floor to sleep,
The Sunken Spire would start to pulse, a soft and rhythmic gleam—
The first erratic heartbeat of a solitary dream.