As for reef poetry, well that's a new one for me. I'm not a poet, but rather a fun loving coral propagator at heart. I make xenia cuttings by cutting single polyps off of any larger colony which I refer to as the mother colony. I just place them in a gravel bowl to attach within a few days to one week. A gravel bowl is actually more exciting than the super bowl. It's a bowl with a little bit of fine gravel or very coarse sand or chips of aragonite rock (that I get from GARF in Idaho) in the bottom of the bowl. It's basically a smaller form of the old method of gravel bed propagation. The bowl just helps keep various cuttings of soft corals from drifting in your reef aquarium before they attach to the gravel. After the cuttings attach to the gravel, you can super glue the gravel chips to larger rocks
You can make a whole slew (20 -50) of these cuttings at one time in just a few minutes by giving your xenia a partial "hair cut" every month. I take scissors in one hand and the turkey baster in the other and just slice and slurp, all in the same place at the same time and then shoot them gently into the gravel bow. Real quick and easy, just like that! Within two months you will have cute little well formed xenia clusters of polyps on stalks. By that time they are about an inch tall, or a bit taller, with a about one or two dozen polyps pulsing away. The cutting that is growing fastest of this last batch, that I made just over three weeks ago, has nine smaller to tiny new polyps surrounding the main large polyp.
Late one night I was up super gluing these newly attached cuttings to bigger rocks to make more mother colonies. Without realizing it, I dropped one of these small aragonite rock chips with super glue and one of my tiny single polyp xenia cuttings on it onto the floor. I did this while gluing several of the new cuttings to one big rock and I think I stepped on it (it looked smashed) and then found it about 20 minutes later. The rock chip was well bonded to the carpet with super glue gel! Don't tell my wife and she won't know since it was in the middle of the night. This is the best time for me to finish up propagation projects. I guess you COULD say I'm up in the night. It's OK now in the tank two weeks later with several new polyps that have grown out of the base. Well, anyway it inspired a poem and I thought you might like it for a change of pace in this sometimes all to serious reef aquarium hobby.
Coral propagation is a real delight
Sometimes it keeps me up half the night
I used to think they were so fragile
But now they seem to be much more agile
Slice 'em and dice 'em Drop 'em on the floor
The really good ones can even take more
A run to the grocery store while they sit on the table
Put them back in the tank and they still seem stable
Don't tell the tree huggers just what I do
My methods and follies they really might rue
Making coral cuttings doesn't seem much like a chore
Or at least it's one that I wouldn't deplore
by Tom Miller