taslishaw: My lovely, kind and gentle friend @wildforwhales wrote this remarkablepoem inspired by
taslishaw: My lovely, kind and gentle friend @wildforwhales wrote this remarkable poem inspired by the Southern Resident killer whales. Please enjoy. . . My family wrapped me in their language weeks before I was born, their whistles threading past my mother’s skin to trace me in her cavernous womb. My sister knew the first beating of my heart. She felt it beneath my mother’s as quiet as a lapping wave but there, nonetheless. In time the space behind my ribs filled with a pulse that ebbed and flowed in synchrony with the salmon we chased: Chinook governed our lives like some moody higher power. When the bellies of her children and her children’s children were full of the fatty fish, my grandmother paused to doze in kelp forests, and she’d bundle me in whistles that arched and billowed like the fronds I had yet to see. I learned the cradling nature of kelp through glimpses of sound that snaked past my mother’s jaw and curled around mine. But mostly our bellies weren’t full, and there wasn’t time for forests of kelp or sound. The second my flukes, folded and soft, touched seawater, I wanted to slither back into my mother’s warmth. The cold bled through my skin and sank like a heavy anchor in my bones. What little heat my mother could provide came in the waning stream of her milk, but even that had the icy taint of chemicals. To feed me she had no choice but to poison me, and starve herself. As I watched her softness give way to sharp edges I felt I was a leech sucking the life from her, and we both took on the translucency of famine. https://ift.tt/2p2cn1D -- source link
#southern residents#orcinus orca#blackfish