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Whale under water

The Submariner’s Story

By Rob Carney

Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series

 
World Whale Day is the third Sunday in February, so this year it falls on the 19th. I know I can’t be the only one who thinks this isn’t enough, that this is absurd: just one out of 365 days—a single calendar box—and that’s it for the blues and bowheads and humpbacks and grays? I mean, what are we even doing here?

This poem won’t add another day for them, I know. But I’m offering it anyway. And maybe in this shortest month of the year, we might think a few times about whales.

The Submariner’s Story

For starters, you say it “submareener,”
not the English way. Like what,

because they had Shakespeare
now it’s, “Al-you-mini-oom biscuit save the Queen?”…

not as long as she’s the captain. And second,
and this is what matters: Think like a whale:

All the fathoms and distance.
All the seafloor mountains snowless.

All the cuttlefish shifting
like kaleidoscopes of light,

these lightshows
with poisonous beaks,

these beaks
that’ll cut through crabs.

All this blue—
where all sounds elongate—

is your home.
So there’s nothing to miss here.

That’s something the whales know already, of course,
and one day the linguists will prove it.

They’ll translate their singing,
and the chorus will be, “It’s our home.”

 

  

Rob CarneyRob Carney’s first collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens, is out now from Stormbird Press, and his new book of poems, Call and Response, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Previous books include Facts and Figures, The Last Tiger is Somewhere, The Book of Sharksand 88 Maps.

Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
 
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
 
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.

Header photo by jamesteohart, courtesy Shutterstock.

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