“Community for Bayelsa butcher big whale wey land beach” – BBC News Pidgin headline
In Okpoama, they say a whale washed up on the beach,
blubbery baby basking in the sun, slick
skin slackening as the tide retreats and home stretches
farther away. I do not ask if they tried to save it.
I do not ask if they felt it heave
its last breath before they bloodied
their machetes. I do not ask, but they tell me
they had meat for days,
that it needed no oil, bare
pans sizzling with what men
nearly ended that species
for not long ago. Now,
we sink metal fangs into the ground,
drills descending into the past, robbing tombs
for black gold. Glutted on death.
Gutting our planet.
Now, we bring ourselves
to extinction.
H.B. Asari is a Niger Deltan poet currently exiting her Fleabag era and entering her Elle Woods era. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize; shortlisted for the Climate Change Poetry Prize 2022 and won the Stephen A. Dibiase Poetry Prize 2024; and has appeared in Ake Review, Fantasy Magazine, FIYAH, Haven Spec and Consequence Forum. You can find her occupying the double reality of not wanting to be found but having an Instagram as @draft_oroguitas.
Photo by Orkhan Farmanli on Unsplash