My father died snarling.
The white coats clucked their tongues
And pronounced him, well, dead.
His Lithuanian Amenta
Refused Saint Peter's timeshare and instead
Floated him through the ethos
Past Stalin's brigades,
Hula Hoops,
Flappers with delicious thighs
And his favorite TV dinners.
Before carefully tucking in his ghost at Yankee Stadium
In the weed-infested graveyards
Alongside his fallen idol Mickey Mantle.
As Mel Allen shouted, "How about that!"
To the roar of the crowd.
The end began with pilot whales
Washing up like seaweed
Along the sullen' shores of Cape Cod.
First, one or two.
Then, pairs, then hundreds of pairs.
Vacationers surfed over their skeletons
To repack their belching SUV's.
And drove in caravans to where there
Were only sharks biting.
Honorable men in immaculate black gowns
Administered extreme unction
And poked and prodded the whales
And declared a miracle had occurred.
They tried to coax the whales back into the water.
But the whales clung to the shore in panic.
The blue ocean, their home for billions of years,
Had become an acid bath.
And the whales could swim in it no longer.
"Nonsense", cried the Honorable Men.
"Whales evolved... blah,blah,blah...
social mechanisms... blah,blah,blah
enters a disorienting... blah, blah, blah...
tragic consequences of social bonding... blah, blah, blah..."
But the whales were having none of it.
Burrowing ever deeper into their sandy graves
Alongside Tutankhamen bunker.
Dreaming of the time when they were still free.
Ron Spurga grew up during the anti-war movement of the 1960's and worked as a community organizer on Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. He subsequently founded L.E.S.C.I.A., a political satire theatre company which is producing his latest play about the aftermath of 9/11, "Alphabet City." His poems have been published in France and in the Netherlands.