Delmarva Review: Two Million Breaths by Wendy Mitman Clarke

Author’s note: “The story of Tahlequah carrying her dead calf for 17 days rivets and shatters me. Anthropogenic factors including pollution and depletion of chinook salmon have put this group of whales on the Endangered Species list. Every birth is vital. Tahlequah’s calf lived just half an hour. Each time she surfaced to breathe, she was trying to revive the daughter we had helped kill. As a mother, I can’t bear the grief; as a human, I can’t tolerate our complicity.”

Two Million Breaths

       For Tahlequah—
      who carried her dead calf seventeen days,
      a thousand miles, through the Salish Sea

You carry your pain like a warrior
carries her dead, the strange cradle

of your face obscured by the body
limp as a child pulled from the rubble

of your world. You surface to breathe
and the rainbowed spray belies

your labor of witness, two million breaths
you shared as one. When the moment came

to give birth did you feel that startled
regret of separation, some subtle thief

who sliced out your heart still
beating? Rising, falling, unrelenting

metronome of breath to carry
this loss that belongs to us all now—

we unforgiven—this abyss of knowing
your name, the shattered light

of your passage. When you lift
your dead hope, you are a broken

bone splintering the skin of water,
a white spear through the sea.

♦

Wendy Mitman Clarke’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction writing has been featured in numerous publications, including River Teeth and Smithsonian. She won the Pat Nielsen Poetry Prize in 2015 and 2017, and her poem “The Kiss” (Delmarva Review, Vol. 8) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Still Water Bending, her novel, was published in October 2017. Website: www.WendyMitmanClarke.com.

Delmarva Review is an independent, nonprofit literary journal publishing the best of new prose and poetry selected from thousands of submissions. Partial financial support comes from individual contributions and a grant from the Talbot County Arts Council with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. The review is available worldwide from major online booksellers and specialty regional bookstores. For more information, please see the website: www.DelmarvaReview.org.