Whaling Days

Plunging into old accounts of whaling vessels and their crews,
one is amazed at what risks they would run to fill their holds with oil:
each massive whale an oil-rich state they must subdue, invade, despoil,
stakes desperate on either side - lives on the line, to gain or lose.
Knowing that for many there was not the liberty to choose,
one grudgingly admires their grim tenacity in grisly toil,
pursuing pods where icy crags rub shoulders with sea-mists that coil
about the quarry, camouflage from those who plunder and abuse…

I sometimes muse about the woman, wakeful in her lonely bed,
wondering if spring would bring glad tidings or a sense of dread;
I think, too, of the man aloft, the crow's nest crusted with ice-lace,
the sailor, numb to pain or death, who fumbles to recall her face,
and hears faint echoes of the whales as cries of village women, keening,
wondering if blood and steaming oil eclipse life's deeper meaning…


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