Poem: Menfishers
This poem was inspired and sponsored by marina_bonomi. (You may also enjoy reading the original, quite detailed prompt describing delphine-human cooperation.) Herein the dolphins explain their relationship with humans. It is written with some delphine phrasing in an attempt to show how the perceptions of people who live in a 3D aquatic environment and see with their ears would come across in English. They tend to think in layers and with ideas pointing in two directions at once. Language can express just about any concept if one is willing to bend it enough!
Menfishers
We are the menfishers.
We spend our waking times
teachlearning with the humans.
They are blind and deaf and dumb,
clumsy in our waterworld;
they are difficult to care for,
but we persist.
When they slap the water with their sticks,
we know they are ready to catch fish with us.
We drive the mullet toward the shallows
where the men cast things like grasping seaweed
to haul in their share of the catch. We eat what remains.
When we form a line along the seacoast,
the men gather and wait upon the shore.
They watch as one of us swims out and back,
then they cast blindly into the murky water
where we have dancepointed them to the fish.
Amidst the confusion, we feast.
Sometimes they stray into the vastdeep waters,
riding things that float like giant coconut hulls.
The humans swim poorly when stormtossed into high waves.
Sometimes we reach them in time to guide them ashore.
Sometimes we do not.
We know that the humans can be heedless.
We have heardseen the sendings
of the other dolphins and the whales and all the rest.
Still we persist.
We are the menfishers: we know
that they are not altogether incapable of teachlearning.