You whale-watchers,
In squeaks and squawks,
A flotsam of plastic agitations,
Littered and self-absorbed,
Your cackles falter
over the edge of oceans
as I fall back
Rolling far back into depths /
Depths blue beyond your death,
Rolling far back
Into a black and godless salvation
Where my contour of meat and muscle
Beats with Gaia’s girdled tides
This rocky planet’s circulation;
My unbecoming,
diffuse along the ocean streams
A holy-ghost glide of tapering flippers
And I slumber
Suspended in watery ether
As an earthly harmony /
Now
To awake from such oceanic dreams
Choking
In an ocean-toilet of your trash,
Predatory plastic in smothering bags
Micro-pellets corrupting away lungs,
A calf, cancered by chemicals
Drifts, beyond help, to the futile
Clicks and calls of her mother,
hysterical among the nursing currents /
Once the whale’s song is gone
We will drift together, rudderless
Under the cold indifference of stars.
Notes:
Blue Whales were almost hunted to extinction before the international whaling ban in 1967. The current global population is believed to be 3~11 % of the original total. The threats to the whale population are shipping, fishing, ocean pollution (plastics) and climate change affecting the krill it depends on for food.
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