For a Bottle-Nosed Dolphin Off the New Jersey Coast, Penny Harter

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Deaths at Sea

For a Bottle-Nosed Dolphin Off the New
Jersey Coast
Penny Harter

You can see the lungs of your mate begin to fill.
Does she, twisting her head on its muscled torso,
notice the first signs of the plague
that has already taken so many?
You both have watched it again and again,
slow suffocation,
skin peeling to raw abscess,
the growing weakness,
until they wash up on the shore,
dead or dying.

"It won't happen to us,"
you said to one another,
grieving together in the dark water.
"We have been too happy."

But here it is,
the shadow of fluid rising in her lungs
to drown her;
the fever, the chills, her listless body.

You want to be next.
You follow her, coming in close to the shore.
When you call she cannot answer.

Humans bend over the bodies of your kin,
probing, trying to help.
They carry her away from you,
her breath still bubbling unevenly.
You fear they cannot stop the plague.
You know you will never see her again.

Your children have followed you,
and your friends who are left wait out beyond the breakers.
Still, you linger in the shallows.
The humans run up and down the beach.
You watch their lungs,
the pumping of their hearts.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Penny Harter was born in 1940. Her work appears in magazines and anthologies worldwide. Her most recent books are Lizard Light: Poems from the Earth and Buried in the Sky. She is a teaching artist for the Arts-in-Education program sponsored by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; for more information on her teaching, workshops, and writing, please visit http://penhart.home.att.net. This poem was previously published in the anthology Under a Gull's Wing: Poems and Photographs of the Jersey Shore (Harvey Cedars, N.J.: Down the Shore Publishing, © 1996) and is reprinted by permission of the author.