1 poem
Blue Whale Hydrophone
Playing a wine glass with
one finger, wet, around the rim
would almost make a sound that rings like this,
an eerie chime that comes from something liquid,
were it not so high-pitched; this sound is more
a press than piercing soar.
It’s almost like the blare
of foghorn song through winter air,
along with all the warm-up clicks and clinks
as cogs begin to grind their teeth, and link
steel to steel: this strain is one of metal.
Whistle from a kettle.
And then there’s that low oh,
something like a human, or cow –
as nosing in the grass she notices
her calf has left her side, and focuses
her mother’s care into a heavy bellow
which sinks to fields below.
The ghostliest police
siren, heard as a steady pulse
miles above a dark city (now the size
of a postage stamp, lit by fairy lights)
might reverberate like this, a sonic
stretching, a symphonic
mix of cars and background
chatter, the sudden echo round
a corner as a motorbike zooms past,
and with it all the tiniest broadcast
from a disgruntled insect as it whines
itself into tiredness.
Beneath the snores and hums
is a louder noise, louder pulse,
the heavy and iambic double beat
of the four-chambered and enormous heart –
which sounds, and sounds, and sounds, and sounds again,
accenting the sea lane.
Suzannah V. Evans has published poems in Carcanet’s New Poetries VIII, with other poems broadcast on BBC Radio Bristol. She is the winner of the 2020 Ivan Juritz Prize for Creative Experiment and of a 2020 Northern Writers’ Award from New Writing North. Her debut double pamphlet Marine Objects / Some Language was published in 2020 by Guillemot Press, and her second poetry pamphlet Brightwork is now available from the same press.