The soft white belly of the oceanic manta ray 
looks like the sky from below, did you know? 
I learned it today from a writer of fictions, 
his stories more true than any we hear on the 
nightly news. 

Does the manta ray know of the libels we tell,  
the ones we believe and the ones we pretend to?  
The space between truths is a gaping wound.
Does the manta ray bleed like the heart of the 
liberal?

We live on islands amid great oceans, divided 
by lies as much as by water, the giant manta ray
travels the depths, aware perhaps as we are not
that under the water all islands touch, and are
one.*


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*from Ursula LeGuin, somewhere in Earthsea