Ark of the Lost Angels

Rosie the Shark _{(Credit: Reddit)}

Green, emerald green, a twisted emerald green.
The corpse of the great white hangs in poison.
Poison designed to preserve a dead thing,
Marred by the waste that sits in this grave,
What was bright and clear
Is now a dark, sickly green.
Fools, ignorant fools,
Fools who take hammers to the glass,
Who throw old televisions and scraps inside
The home of the frozen dead thing.
They poison the poison,
Turning the dead into a ruin.
Death by the net,
Of the small fleshy things,
Who killed and preserved it.
The same fleshy things,
Who vandalized this grave,
And the hunter in it.

I try not to talk too much about the creative works I post here and let them stand on their own, but this one is too cool not to talk about. This poem was originally written during my junior year of college for a creative writing class. We had been prompted to write a poem inspired by a news headline. I was instantly reminded of the image of this great white shark preserved in formaldehyde I had seen on Reddit earlier that week (the photo at the top of this article). The shark found fame thanks to urban explorers, and was featured in several articles, including this one from Vice .

As I would come to discover with my reading, it turned out that Rosie was an abandoned exhibit at a long defunct wildlife center in Australia. She was a Great White Shark who died off the coast of southern Australia after getting trapped in a fishing net in 1997. She was acquired by the Wildlife Wonderland theme park, and preserved. Wildlife Wonderland closed operations in 2012, and Rosie was left abandoned. There, she remained in suspended decay for years until she was discovered in late 2018. Her newfound fame had put her in danger as more of the urban explorers which came to see her were less worried about maintaining the integrity of the tank.

The poem was written in a moment of reverence and sadness over the shark’s eventual fate: to decay forgotten and abandoned thanks to careless people. I was wrong in my assessment, however, Rosie’s story has a happy ending. Her fame prompted Crystal World Exhibition Center to agree to take her in and continue the preservation efforts so she could be seen by other people. Her journey can be read about here. Crystal World Australia, her new caretakers, have a page about her here.