Cetacean sea shanty

Their songlines commemorate similar journeys
running the gauntlet of carnage and gales,
each nomad recalling the stations of bloodshed,
the outposts of hell where men rendered the whales.

After the genocide, still without homelands,
embattled survivors migrate for their lives
through seas where harpoons, in alliance with "science",
stalk the diminishing maritime tribes.

Past Eden and Byron, then past Moreton Island
the behemoths journey with ghosts of their kind,
with memories of massacre deep in the psyche,
a red thread of sorrow that links mind to mind.

Ashore, other species who call themselves human
continue to slaughter and torture and maim;
costly memorials honour their battles,
those who died fighting in this or that name.

No monuments honour brine's victims of horror;
armed vessels still travel the ways of the whales;
bones of the fallen in vaults of the ocean
call to the living who follow their trails.

The noblest of nomads to brave the world's seas
still have no safe conduct, are now refugees...