I think I've changed a lot.
My hair's turned white.
I'm going to read a couple of poems
and then I'll read some stories.
The first poem I read is called Shooting Whales.
When the shoals of plankton swarmed into St Margaret's Bay
turning the beaches pink, we saw from our place
on the hill the sperm whales feeding,
fouling the nets in their play and breaching clean.
So the humps of their backs rose over the wide sea meadows.
Day after day we waited inside for the rotting plankton
to disappear.
The smell stilled even the wind and the oxen
looked stunned pulling hay on the slope of our hill.
But the plankton kept coming in and the whales would not go.
That's when the shooting began.
The fisherman got in their boats and went after the whales.
And my father and uncle and we children went too.
The froth of our wake sank fast in the wind shaken water.
The whales surfaced close by.
Their foreheads were huge.
The doors of their faces were closed.
Before sounding, they lifted their flukes into the air
and brought them down hard.
They beat the sea into foam and the path
that they made shone after them.
Though I did not see their eyes, I
imagined they were like the eyes of mourning, glazed with rheum,
watching us, sweeping along under the darkening
sheets of salt. When we cut our engine
and waited for the whales to surface again,
the sun was setting, turning the rock strewn barrens
a gaudy salmon.
A cold wind flailed at our skin.
When finally the sun went down and it
seemed like the whales had gone, my uncle, no longer afraid,
shot aimlessly into the sky.
Three miles out in the rolling dark, under the moon's
astonished eyes.
Our engine would not start.
And we headed home in the dinghy.
And my father, hunched over the oars, brought us in.
I watched him, rapt in his effort, rowing
against the tide, his blond hair glistening with salt.
I saw the slick spillage of moonlight being
blown over his shoulders and the sea
and spindrift suddenly silver.
He did not speak the entire way.
At midnight, when I went to bed, I
imagined the whales moving beneath me,
sliding over the weed covered hills of the deep.
They knew what I was.
They were luring me downward and downward
into the murmurous waters of sleep.