Stephanie Green
Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize Winner
Extract from the winning collection
Inside the Whale Museum
(Húsavík, Iceland)
A cavernous space, glaucous light,
and I’m walking on the ocean floor
while shadowy cetaceans float above.
A moan reverberates through the museum,
white dashes shoot in bursts
across a black cymatic screen:
musical notes defined by the surrounding
silence of the ocean; a song
which can be heard from Portugal to Iceland,
now drowned, scrambled by engines
of container ships, tankers and ferries.
Here in the museum I follow the moan
to a film of you, a hunchback with your calf.
Ringed with wrinkles, the light in your eye
is the pure, clean flame of oil.
I climb up wooden stairs to a platform
level with a vast skeleton. I never knew
that hidden inside each flipper are finger-joints.
I remember we are cousins,
as now outstretched towards me
you hold out your hand.