The Pilot Whale

[BobBradshaw]

The Pilot Whale

I was on a beach that scraped
the side of a wilderness.
I grabbed her tail and yanked
but it swung up
like a play yard swing,
an uppercut that sent me sprawling.
She lay on her side
the whole time I threw buckets
of water onto her.
Her jaw jostled. I've seen a dying stork,
its bill open the same way.
Her eye held me, pleading.
Finally her eye went
as empty as an abandoned pail,
and still I kept pouring.
One day it could be me dying
under a stranger's watch.

[CalebMurdock]

Am I to take it that you are personifying the wilderness as some kind of female creature with a tail? That's going to take some mulling over. Maybe I'm missing something.

[BobBradshaw]

No, it’s about a beached pilot whale.

[FranktheFrank]

A sad day for N, Bob, a bad day.
It is thought that algae cause the problem in their brain
a kind of poison fungi in the sea, a bloom.

I saw one once, washed up on the beach
massive animal, unbelievable in scale compared to us.
I know plot whales are smaller, much smaller,
but still larger than us.

I suppose it would have reminded N about his/her own finite existence
death coming ever closer and I guess the memory would have stayed
with him/her for some time.

I watched a documentary about whales tonight.
They were almost hunted to extinction until 1980
But their exitance is tied into that of krill
and krill populations have never grown back
to 1980 levels.

Japs still eat them and Norwegians.

[BobBradshaw]

Thanks, Ieuan. Climate change and the disasters it’s causing are scary.

[CalebMurdock]

I realize now that I blipped over the title when I first read the poem, a bad habit of mine.

Now that I understand what's happening in the poem, I'm trying to figure out whether it works for me.

It seems to me you could milk this poem for a little more poignancy, though I couldn't tell you how.

For me, the poem might be more moving if you replaced that two-line ending with two lines that capsulize your emotions resulting from the experience. Projecting forward to your own death isn't a bad thing to do, but for some reasons those two lines don't resonate with me. If you do keep them, replacing "watch" with "touch" might have more of an impact -- just a suggestion.

I'll come back to this again. Right now it's nap-time.