Whale Poem

Ariadne Vidalakis

To tell the truth, I am really scared of three things: Death, Vulnerability, and Whales.

Whales are so big that their very existence is arrogance. They are the universe’s slimy refrigerator leftovers from the prehistoric era, the scuffed Tupperware of congealed soup it can’t quite bring itself to get rid of.

Their anatomy is so convoluted that the only reason they don’t die of cancer is that they get so much cancer that all their cancer gets cancer and dies.

Their form is basically an enormous blue mass. The only place they can exist is the bottomless blue abyss that is the ocean, so big that all they can do is take up space so that they might make a ripple someday.

Or whales could one day lose their sense of direction and start swimming towards the bottom, not realizing until it’s too late to come up for air.

Whales can use incredibly loud calls to search for others of their kind, but if you get too close the same call is so loud that it can kill you as soon as you hear its plea for company.

If you were swimming next to a whale it it could kill you with one lazy beat of its fins and not even know that it killed someone that only wanted to observe it.

I fear whales, so I know two things: Never take anything for granted, and if you see a whale, Get out of the ocean as fast as you possibly can.