Featured Piece written by Chris Nash ©
Chris tries to use poetry to give a voice to the ones whose voices have been lost or taken away from them. He is currently working on a series of songs that species under severe threat of extinction might sing – if we had ears to listen to them. Blue Whale is one of them.
You whale-watchers,
In squeaks and squawks,
A flotsam of plastic agitations,
Littered and self-absorbed,
Your cackles falter
over the edge of the oceans
as I fall back
Rolling far back into depths.
Depths blue beyond your death,
Rolling far back
Into a black and godless salvation
Where my contour of meat and muscle
Beats with Gaia’s girdled tides
This rocky planet’s circulation;
My unbecoming,
diffuse along the ocean streams
A holy-ghost glide of tapering flippers
And I slumber
Suspended in watery ether
As an earthly harmony.
Now
To awake from such oceanic dreams
Choking
In an ocean-toilet of your trash,
Predatory plastic in smothering bags
Micro-pellets corrupting away lungs,
A calf, cancered by chemicals
Drifts, beyond help, to the futile
Clicks and calls of her mother, hysterical
Among the nursing currents.
Once the whale’s song is gone
We will drift together, rudderless
Under the cold indifference of stars.
About Author
Chris Nash is originally from Wessex, an area at the south-west of England which you won’t find on any maps. Apparently, dragons used to live in its beautiful landscape in the days before agriculture became mechanized.
In 2013 he left England to live in China. He is trying to write poetry without borders. He has been influenced by Chinese poetry which doesn’t try to describe or explain a thing, but to let that thing ‘be’ in words, images and music.
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