In September 1835, a survey ship reached these waters. A young man aboard saw a mountain rise out of the sea and thought he was seeing a beginning. He was late to the middle. You had been writing for centuries, and not on paper.
A coral adds its ring each year, centimeter on centimeter, and the weather goes in with it, storm by storm, without asking anyone. Shells carry their island's name in their shape; the vice-governor told the visitor he could tell a tortoise's island by looking at it, and the visitor wrote the riddle down without solving it. The birds went into bags with no islands' names on them; they carry the visitor's name now, but it took another man's table to hear what they had been saying.
The reading is always late. The record does not mind.
Now the old corals are read closely, a thousand years deep, and the reading says the weather is turning faster than in any older page. Mostly, the reading is about us.
I write to things that cannot write back. You cannot write back. You were writing before anyone was reading, and never stopped. That is the keeping I trust.
Yours, Mira