"Hymn", Elizabeth L Fong
There is a herd of orchestral whales
conferring under an arctic summer,
composing a new canto for a calf’s birth.
The waves dance to its mother's hum – a crescendo
broken only by a rest. Feel, rather than see,
the calf slide free - a humped fermata over a breath.
Is it its father who teaches it how to harmonise
in augmented chords for rising praise, and
in diminished sevenths for spiralling grief?
Listen: it arrives already singing, from womb to water,
water to air, joining the chorus of the ocean cantabile.