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 larger colonies which I refer to as mother colonies. I just place these sinle polyp cuttings in a gravel bowl to attach to crushed coral or aragonite sand/gravel. The cuttings of xenia usually attach within a few days to one week. Xenia is one of the quickest corals to attach. 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 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 these gravel chips with attached cuttings to larger rocks. Super glue gels like super reef gel work best. Rock to rock gluing also tends to work best. You can make cuttings of many different soft corals and mushroom anemones (actinodiscus) using the gravel bowl method.
You can make a whole slew (10 - 30) of these cuttings at one time in just a few minutes by giving your xenia a partial "hair cut" every month. You can fit many more in the bowl at one time, but the incidence of protozoan attack (slime-out) is much higher with larger numbers of fresh cuttings made at all once. I take scissors in one hand and a turkey baster in the other hand and just slice polyps off (about halfway down each of their stems) and simultaneously slurp them into the baster, all in the same place at the same time, and then gently shoot the freshly cut polyps onto the gravel in the bowl, to rest and attach. Real quick and easy, cut, slurp, shoot, just like that!
You can usually glue the gravel chips with attached xenia polyps to other rocks after about a week in the bowl to attach well to the gravel chips. Within two months of making these cuttings with Fiji pom pom xenia, I have cute little well formed xenia, clusters of polyps on stalks, looking like little bonsai trees. 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 the batch that I made just over three weeks ago has nine smaller or tiny new polyps surrounding the original 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 a cutting and super glue 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). I 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 late at night. This is the best time for me to finish up propagation projects. I guess you COULD say I'm up in the night. This cutting is doing very well in the tank now! Two weeks later, it has 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 I believe them to be much more agile
Slice 'em and dice 'em, drop 'em on the floor
The really good ones can take even 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