Great Blue Whale

I imagine you as one imagines a god
who has lifted the weary from under their weariness,
who has sheltered them in your oyster-like gills, fanned out like a rug,
who has hovered over villages broken beyond repair, mines inside of mines,
who has spoken of the pieces of those broken dreams,
who has sunk down into the muddy depths of the worn-out seas, waves upon waves,
who has shattered absence with presence, thrown light, made spirit out of flesh,
who has turned a cave into a mountain, a bough into a crest, mothered a language,
who has made real the wish inside every touch, each cracked hand,
who has not forgotten the grief-songs in pulses, in pauses, in the histories of trauma,
who has dragged a moment out into the momentary,
who has taken the hole in the heart and turned it inside out,
who has drowned with the drowning ages and died with the dying,
who has knelt into the chasm of barbed wire to turn flesh into spirit.

Over villages of wild sea urchins—red-blue, blue-green, yellow-yellow—
lifting the nooks of your great flesh mouth wide as a cavern, a governing
abyss open to those who cannot wait any longer: I imagine you covered
in fibrous earth strands, in the flesh of hard ages, in the soot of a species;
dark grey-blue finite ocean, twitching pulse, cavernous open, ancient death.

I am left to imagine.