Lay for the Day 8th March

The International Whaling Commission agreed that the killing of the great whales for commercial purposes with “cold” (i.e. non-exposive) grenade harpoons should cease, with effect from 8th March 1982. Unfortunately, the Soviet Union, Japan, Brazil, Norway and Iceland – all major whaling nations – declined to abide by this ruling.

Leviathan

When did you come to and when go
from our shores, these continents,
their immensities, condensations,
swathes and buckles no more than spits and bars
to your one ocean, mothering and continuous element?
Denizens of earth and air as you were once
we are woken of fire and its wakers as you never were.
However cumbersome, you felt the strider’s pride,
the contentment to lie down here
where we walk between weather and geology.
Your universal now is only our companion and visitant,
water: while we grapple and couple them,
air touches you only lightly above,
earth holds you slowly below.
What can your mazy, leviathan, musical minds
understand of the erect, difficult livings we make?
What can you make of us, your quick, light,
splay-formed slaughterers? Between your eye
in a bulwark of oil and bone, and mine,
glancing electrically in a blooming networked box,
the beam of mutual intelligence persists
to be unblinded. Like the hunter once we could hear
in our own your mammalian hearts.

John Gibbens, from Pisces

The Lay Reader: an archive of the poetic calendar