A warm clear dry north wind in June.
The sea creased in a wrinkled smile.
The whales are still yet to come.
“Give ‘em time,” sighs old Gorman
- old man’s creased sea-wrinkled face -
“Weeks and weeks to go, there are. Last
year they weren’t here til July.”
Each passing year more whales have come.
There were none when I was young.
They’d died under the hardened points
of harpoons, or their mothers had.
Those big lives, butchered, quivering,
boiled down to steaming sludge,
blood drained off to stain the sea.
Why do they come? Might as well ask
why a north wind blows in June
or why we killed their parents once
or why old Gorman waits for them,
eyes on the wrinkled smiling sea,
looking for one fleet fluke’s flap -
a sign of big lives passing by.
— Nick Carroll
