Horseshoe crabs and I have a long history.
Theirs longer than ours.
These were tossed up on a huge hill of dredge waste, peering through the gray mud.
I have witnessed much, most unspoken, in my years, as I am sure you have, too.
I do not understand, or trust, my silence.
Their blood runs blue, copper grasps the same oxygen molecules that let us strip electrons from our food.
Our blood runs red, the deep rust of iron,
Most of us can see, most of us can talk.
Our stories remain as opaque as the mud deep below the waters of the Delaware Bay, where now in the darkness, a solitary horseshoe crab consumes a careless clam, neither ever seen by humans.
They have not changed much in hundreds of millions of years, their life perfect for their world.
And now they rest on the spoils made by us, we who are impossibly foreign in our own skins, looking for something beyond this life.
When you walk the fissured hillock on a chilly April morning, the exoskeletons whisper what they know.
This is all, and all is enough.
Photos taken by me.
