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Whitby
This is the home of jet - Victorian mourning
Worn gloomily around the necks and firmly pinned to bosoms in black silk
Glossy seaweed , chains of wrack
In shapes like many forms of plankton
Floating in a sooty pool of tides
Urchins , egg case of the dogfish , shark
Jellyfish and things found on the shore
As after Albert’s sad departure , cheer was out of fashion in the Court
Here’s the usual assemblage of birds
Mostly living on or near the sea
Divers geese and cormorants
Giant gulls and spoonbills - auks
That hover just outside the memory
But here they are , encased .They have seen better days
They lived in better days perhaps
Or maybe not so recently
For here is whaling paraphanalia
A crows nest with a telescope to spot them from afar
A rack of iron with barbed harpoons
A bunch of narwhal horns stands on the floor
And towers above my head - so - nine foot tall
And straight - of perfect , twirling , ivory
Sold for twice their weight in gold to kings and conquerors
For rarity and purity and ability to detect and counteract the poison of the poisoner
These Whitby men knew there were no unicorns
This is the secret of the North , they kept it to themselves
These horns were taken from the heads of whales
In blood and Ice and bone
The skeleton is on the wall - high up - a narwhal
The flesh boiled down for oil to light the dark
Above a kayak on a shelf
We walk beneath it through the door
Sea captains sailed from here - this rocky coast requiring nerve and skill
Manovering between the deadly rocks
It sorts them out
The sharp-eyed and the lucky
Captain Scoresby , Captain Cook
Who - sent off to record
The planet Venus transitting the sun ,
Sailed half the way around the globe
Recording places never seen before
Or not by Europeans -
Until the luck ran out for him one summer , on a beach
A thousand miles away and he was greeted by a spear
Quite like the ones he’d left behind
In Yorkshire -
made for flesh of whales
As ribs of whales are like the bones of ships
Wrecked on a further shore
13/02/2019
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