izzy

Whalesong is the only thing that gets me to sleep these days. I built a tank in the backyard and ordered a miniature humpback whale online. I dragged my bed out next to the tank, and for a time it worked a treat. I slept like a baby. I rubbed my whale’s sides in the morning and I fed her extra krill. But it’s beginning to get to me. Now I sit here nights with the sheets wrapped around my head looking wide-eyed through the window on the side of the tank and she won’t stop swimming in circles and she won’t stop banging against the sides and she won’t stop singing. In the days as well as the nights. She just won’t stop singing.

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sarah

I will tell you a secret and it is this:
You have been made holy
By the eternal sacrament
Of the voice and the flesh.
You have been baptized
By the flaming liturgy
Of this winking-eyed shaman
Robed in wood and in steel.
It is old as the skies:
The night and the firelight
The communion of song.
Sit ye down gently
In the darkening day
And behold, as the holy man
Unfolds in the air
See the tear in his throat
And hear the roaring rush in
O! ye sinners, this is the river
As it throws itself off a waterfall
Into the broken toothed rocks below
This is the wind in Icarus’ ears
As he falls, streaming wax
From the heavens
This is the scream of a fire gone mad
Come, stand at the brink
And gaze in awe at the crack in it all
As the chaos floods in.
And then – sudden as morning
The bellow subsides
And the sweetest of whispers
Bathes your reddening cheek
Lo, you mighty, you towering,
You fallen, you meek
You have witnessed the confession
That has scoured you all
That has lifted you up
To the secretive stars
And then placed you again
On an earth you half-knew
When once, as a child,
You crept ‘cross its face.
O child, you are sacred
Through this, you are whole.

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