How did you come to be here, my friend?
One wrong turn
And you’ve reached this dead end.
Abandoned, alone,
Beached far from home,
Bluebottles on blubber and bones.
A day since the sea was warm, blue and bright,
Diving deep,
Then you breached for the light.
It was where you belonged.
There was joy in your song,
Now you’re stripped, with all dignity gone.
In a blink, every wave was cold, iron grey,
The tide turned,
And you drifted this way.
A journey unplanned,
To the shallows, then sand,
Of this desolate, alien land.
They dragged you with ropes at the sound of your cry,
No real hope
But they still had to try.
They shared your last breath,
Just like you, they’re bereft,
A carcass is all they have left.
How could this be the way it turned out?
A furnace
Redundant, burned out.
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(A whale was washed up on Redcar beach around the time the steelworks were shutting down with the loss of thousands of jobs. There were desperate attempts to save both the whale and the blast furnace but it was all in vain. The flies around the whale were like the asset-strippers around the steelworks)