BECAUSE PILOT WHALE PODS HAVE THEIR OWN UNIQUE VOCAL DIALECTS

And because whale song travels four thousand
miles or so, their world aphotic, a darkling sea of sound,
imagine how pilot whales sing their world
into being. But if a whale is abandoned
by the sea like a solitary ink dot on a blank
beach, it spells a catastrophe of love.
Grief after grief, they strand themselves. A whale
won’t escape with its life because losing the chorus
is worse than losing its own voice.

If I could save one whale, I could save the pod.
If I could teach a whale to go numb, would it
break free and outswim its grief? Imagine
a pilot whale alone, alive, in a vast, illucid
deep. Would I have unmade the world?
To keep what we can’t afford to lose, we cast
ourselves against the straining sky, the starving
shore, to cling until the last note to the world,
to the ones whose love is the world.

E. L. Diamond is a writer and educator currently living in Omaha, Nebraska. Her short fiction and poems have appeared in journals such as The Pinch, Literary Orphans, The American Journal of Poetry, The 2River View, and Storyglossia. She blogs about queer life and love in the Midwest, along with pieces on writing and editing, at eldiamond.org.