Blue Whales

By Anonymous

How they are comparable to
the biggest dinosaurs that once lived
on this turquoise globe; titanosaurs
and argentinosauruses, ranging
from tens to more than one hundred feet
in length. How they swim using
their tailing flukes and pectoral fins below
the surface of a jagged edge, only
making a grand entrance, twisting
their obese bodies and flashing their tails
feet-high in the air. How the blue whale,
the Sinatra of the ocean, whose
crooning songs, glide through air & salt,
marking an elaborate mating ritual;
how they roll and rocket up to air,
while spearing out gametes.

How the birth of a baby whale, is no fluke.
It is marked by a journey of thousands
of miles, to warmer equatorial waters,
and a return to the habitual hunting ground
of shoals of krill, flapped to the mouth
by the two prong fluke. How the story of
a blue whale mother giving birth
to her calf, captures our imagination
and attention; a tale of a birth canal
and the freedom of realizing,
that the sappy soap of child birth, has all the elements
of a Nicholas Sparks novel; twists, turns,
mush and a sentimentality that
makes grown women cry, seeing
a baby whale being born.

How a mother whale shelters
her calf, as she lets him be carried
on beneath her blubber belly, sometimes,
pushed to the front of by her snout,
knowing that the difference between
soppy and sloppy, is survival.
How they roam the seas together, singing
the songs that make sailors at sea,
think of their wives at home, tormented by
sightings of fluking, distracted in
mind, to entertain mermaids.

A juvenile whale calf, who by instinct,
leaps high, spins and turns the torso,
lifting his fluke, only to dive below,
like a spinning ballerina, after an airy jump,
which amasses the whale faithful, to
watch from the nearby hull of a lookout boat.
How the first breath is always special,
to a bantam weight milksop,
still sopping on his mother’s milk,
knowing that his calcified milky-white spears,
were lost to evolution, well before
the ontogeny of baleen; sheets of armor,
draped down from the upper jaw,
made of long tapering tassels,
frills harvesting krill.

How a blue beast is more of a beauty,
like a doming turquoise mosque high above
the Istanbul skyline, as we, the ones,
inspired or mad enough to chase whales,
are gifted with a truth, that befalls us,
like an earth-bound flared asteroid,
kindling something deep from within us.
The math of calculating the sheer numbers
of miniature shrimp that must perish
to build a monument of flesh,
padded with body fat. How the fasting diets,
deplete whale blubber, one chain at a time,
as they migrate from frigid polar waters,
to latitudes of the equator,
to beautify a blue heifer,
transforming her,
into a cow.

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