polyps

I know the basic facts about coral polyps. Little, defenceless creatures who use minerals they find floating around to build themselves an armour, or a home, that stays on long after they are dead to form other living things’ homes, and tourist sites, and holiday islands.
But what does the polyp feel about it, I wonder? Little, colourless, limp creature with eyes cautiously peeping, does he know that he’s doing just what those slaves who built the Pyramids, and the slaves who built the Great Wall, did ? Only we assume he does it of his own volition. There is no great and cruel Coral Lord to cut off his thumbs or his head after, say, the Barrier Reef’s constructed. Does he even know that’s what he’s doing when he secretes himself a hidey-hole ? Did they ?
And how do they all pile up so efficiently and organisedly if there isn’t a polyp Architect or Contractor to oversee things with the Bigger Picture in mind ? (with a coral hard-hat on, of course. Safety First.)
Maybe it’s really a pilgrimage, the last journey of every polyp, to die in the place all polyps go to die, to fulfil some destiny too vast for any of them to see. A polyp Haj. So that the Maldives are actually the polyp version of the Park Street Cemetery. ‘Sacred to the memory’ written in the polyp tongue that hides the secret of the Greater Purpose.
And then, what they leave behind is really greater than what the Egyptian slaves did, or the Chinese, because it lives. It’s a home, not a tomb or a public works project. For ever after, each polyp who added his bit is blessed by the each little fish family, each cranky old sting-ray who found the perfect hollow, even though the neighbourhood is a bit loud, and the cool dude fish who consider themselves lucky that they got a pretty neat place at such low rental, in such a happening spot. And there are colour carnivals, and swim-abouts, and plankton on the house, and sometimes, huge figures in black sticky-suits, who point, and stare in wonder. Life illuminates the things he left behind.Would you call it a noble act if it was a matter of course, and not some decision in the face of insurmountable odds ? It was definitely a good act, in result at least, that those polyps did. Even if they didn’t know the master plan. Even if they were only instruments. Each of them, I suppose, was free to not play second fiddle to the millions of others who had done this thing before him. Just to be contrary, they could have floated out and surrendered their skeletons to the deep black of the Marianas Trench. But they didn’t. And so the music came to be. Here’s lookin’ at you, polyp.