Bridge: Battersea
Title: The Thames Whale
Writer: Justina Hart
Creative partner: Justina Hart and Sheena Clover
The work: 20 x 10 inches, acrylic paint, collage including map and photograph, white acrylic pen
Description: A poem describing the culmination of a female juvenile Northern Bottlenose Whale’s journey along the Thames in January 2006. 39 words. A longer narrative poem accompanies the artwork.
THE THAMES WHALE
Justina Hart
I don’t know how I lost my way:
I was clicking with my pod, then
gliding alone through iceberg fields
by the moon-day and night-sun.
I’m a queen of the open blue –
bottle-beaked and proud,
still growing: slim, lightweight –
a daughter wedded to the sea.
Strange booms in my ears
harpooned me like a shoal of fish
being caught in a quivering net –
I slipped into foreign oceans.
I bask in the rich, searing cold
that goes on for dolphin-miles –
my world’s old, unfound, not land,
almost all Arctic: wet and floes.
I thrashed my tail, turned about
but the waters grew warmer
till I was pushed into this dim strait
lacking salt – find I can’t get out.
I feed so deep on inky squid,
diving in tomb-coloured black,
spout water jets as I rise,
ice-diamonds sparkling in my eyes.
I struggle to submerge in shallows,
scrape the muddy floor for shrimp,
rise among tooting barges,
blowing for more and more breath.
I keen for my kin, my familiars
as I cut through the navy waves,
dream of reunion in brine-fields
where we battle, calf and die.
I make for the central giant wings,
but blinded by siltwater and shouts,
my skinny belly grates on sand.
I’m banked! No answer when I call.
Tiny beings tie me, hoist me
helpless onto a floating raft.
I rise higher than in any storm –
crowned a river queen for a day.
————————————–
In January 2006, a female Northern Bottlenose Whale, whose normal habitat is the North Atlantic Ocean, swam up the Thames as far as Battersea Bridge, where she became stranded. It is believed the whale became disoriented in the North Sea due to underwater noise pollution, such as naval sonar. A rescue team lifted the whale off the sandbank on an inflatable pontoon and put her on a barge to take her to deeper waters, but sadly, she suffered seizures and died en route.