A SPERM WHALE BIRTH

by Pepper Trail

 

 

 

Unimaginable, but imagine—birth into water, but needing air

Your head emerging last, sheltered until the last moment within your mother

Then, the shock of ocean—the world—and the powerlessness

Your flukes folded, useless, body limp, the surface unreachable

 

But you are not alone, and your mother is not alone

There is a community, her old friends, and your aunties and sisters

They are there, all around, excited, anxious to welcome, to help

Their bursts of clicks your first hearing, this code meaning “belonging”

 

They balance you on their great heads, lift you into the light, and you breathe

Between their gentle bodies they squeeze you, and you breathe

They keep away the circling dolphins, and you breathe

They keep watch for sharks, and you breathe

 

At last your body stiffens, balances in the water

You take your first milk, wise with a baby’s knowledge

Your aunties drift apart, exclaiming as they go

At your mother’s side, you slowly swim, and begin to be a whale

 

Based on detailed observations of a sperm whale birth, as reported in Nature and Science.

Listen to an NPR report.

 

 

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. 

 

WARM AND CUDDLY BELONGING FOR ALL

by Lynne Barnes

 

 

A hospital patient who managed to talk a man out of detonating a bomb in a maternity wing said the would-be attacker “asked for a cuddle” before standing down. Nathan Newby, who stopped an atrocity through an act of kindness, spoke publicly for the first time about his encounter with Mohammad Farooq before receiving the George Medal [from King Charles, above] for bravery. Farooq, a clinical support worker who took a viable pressure cooker bomb into St James’s hospital in Leeds intending to “kill as many nurses as possible” was jailed for at least 37 years last year. After asking for a cuddle, Farooq told Newby to “phone the police before I change my mind.’ —The Guardian, March 24, 2026

 

 

Oh, the layers of life right now—
sweet family visit with my
thirty-something god-nephew
and our goddess-niece, his wife.
Calming, evocation of
belonging, togetherness, as we
commune deeply with them.
They are artists, teachers, such
loving creatures, here with their
stray-rescued-as-a-puppy-ten-years-ago,
Navajo, to spend the night with us.
 
Bearing down on that layer is
a dangerous one above it,
malignant, narcissistic,
Machiavellian, sadistic,
hanging by a thread—
a heavy concrete cloud,
just above our heads,
visible, threatening,
seeded with stress and dread.
I fly above into
the stratosphere of compassion,
look down through the conflicting,
complex layers of our
human race in this era.
 
Kindness, not war and hate, 
rescues minds from harmful ideas.
Will we learn to weave empathic ropes
to throw, not just to those we love,
but to those who other us as well?
 
Can humanity, we, reel away from our
constant collapse into competing cultiness,
a tendency in all of us?
 
Broader belonging, expansive,
Transcendent Human Tribe is now
our mental moon shot challenge.
 
How will it come? I wonder as I land
back on earth from my imaginary
skyward travel. Perhaps
 
Eroding Othering
should be a sibling category
to the Nobel Prize for Peace.
 
All this I think as anxious rescue Navajo
finally stops pacing, settles out of her
traumatic memories of her early life
on the reservation, on the streets—
packless, othered, bitten, diseased.
 
At last, she welcomes our acceptance,
lets us pet her, relaxes on her
fluffy, gray, perfect circle of bed.

Lynne Barnes' poetry memoir Falling into Flowers won the 2017 Goodreads Rainbow Award for Best Gay and Lesbian Poetry, was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and received Honorable Mention in both the Gay and Poetry categories for the 2018 San Francisco Book Festival Awards.