'The living are losing color'

At Maribo, sharp-eyed Simon Donner records the sighting of a rare species: a poem about coral bleaching. The Fever by Kimiko Hahn is in The New Yorker, of all places. I'm not sure what to make of the penultimate verse (if that's the right word for it).

As far as I know, climate change has made it as a topic to what they used to call "high art" such as opera only in the last year or two (unless that's what Götterdämmerung was really about all along!). The Water Diviner's Tale, for example, was premiered at the Proms, a summer series of mostly classical music in London, on 27 August (see here - scroll down). And last autumn may have been the first appearance of the anthropocene at the opera: in a work for mp3 player called And while London burns (my review is here). Can a cantata about vanishing corals be far behind?