Whale

For Jonah

For year and years,

I thought I had invented it.

A collage from stories,

Nature documentaries,

And Time Life picture books;

You can’t forget something so huge!

But no one remembered the whale.

No one but me.

My visual memories are rare and scattered,

So why would one be

Blubber and whale skin,

A strange, chthonic smell,

And size, oh, sweet Jesus,

The monstrous size of it.

It’s deathly pale underbelly

That massive gaping jaw,

And it’s dead, empty eye.

So vacant, and yet so sad.

I remember I wanted to touch it.

That strange, cold, fishy flesh.

I wanted to stroke it, to soothe it somehow.

I felt it wanted comforting, that it was lonely.

Perhaps I sensed somehow

That he was missing his brothers.

I saw a whale! It stuck in my head.

It was at Belle Vue Zoo,

Because where else would it be?

Lying, beached, on a flatbed truck,

Labelled as if it were a frog

In a school science lesson.

The stench of formaldehyde

Wreathing the air all around.

Someone must have been with me

That day, when I saw it.

Someone must have taken me.

I was only a child.

But no one remembered.

And for so long it seemed like some mad dream.

No mention in the press.

It’s as if no one noticed

A dead whale being driven around the country.

It’s not something surely

You can do without one person

Thinking they might take a snap?

So it just became the strange thing

That I made up one day,

And I couldn’t explain why

When I saw pictures of whales,

I felt so odd, so melancholy.

As if there was something I needed to remember,

But had forgotten how.

Like finding my way back to the sea.

When I was at high school,

There were specimens

Preserved in formaldehyde

And the smell made me feel

Like I missed the sea, for no reason

I could really name.

And I longed to set the long-dead

Invertebrates free from their jars.

Like a modern Frankenstein

Of the fourth form.

I unscrewed too many lids

And some were never the same again.

Then one day, very recently,

I saw someone had created an art exhibit

To commemorate three long dead whales.

And their names were Goliath,

Jonah and Hercules,

And they had toured Europe

From the 50s until the 70s

On the back of three huge trucks.

And I felt like I could cry

For that beautiful sad whale

I saw, so long ago.

Who wasn’t ever a dream.

And who had never found his way

Back to the sea again.

The story goes that he’s frozen

Somewhere in storage,

Like a fairytale princess.

And now I dream about him again

That I wake him from decades of slumber.

And one day at last,

He finds his way back

To the sea again,

And he returns to the deep dark places

Where he always belonged.