Soundings

for the whales…

Millennia before the Ark we learned to navigate,
and on the gruelling journeys we spun anecdotes and tales,
vocalising soundings into notes and choruses and scales -
nomads of the ocean steppe, predestined to migrate.
We had profound pelagic visions to articulate,
glimpses of a world untouched by surface turbulence and gales
that jeopardised the flimsy wooden vessels' pitching masts and sails -
but humans, we concluded, learn too little and too late…

We could sense their tidal shifts of loneliness and fear and loss,
those voyagers embarked on dreams of conquest, bent on gain;
but like all buccaneers and predators, they dealt in mortal pain,
respecting neither whales nor soaring albatross…
Their lust for gain and conquest brought us genocide and misery:
we couriers of memory bequeath this testimony...
 


*The mention of the albatross is a reference to the sailors' superstition
that to kill an albatross - a bird of good omen - is to bring doom on a
vessel (as narrated in Coleridge's ballad, "The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner"). In some cultures the same belief applies to whales.