A Whale’s Tale

By Steve Luttrell

In the beginning
is the name
and the name be

Ishmael

and this man went forth
an orphan to the world
that would receive him.
The story he would tell,
one of fate and retribution.

It was a hard world then,
where men would come together
to chart a common course
and with no care for prophecy
to take the devil’s coin.
A crew of men to man and sail
the whaler named

The Pequod

Sailing out from salt–stained
old “Nantuck”
with its captain so named

Ahab

at the helm.
A captain known to all
with a vengeance in his blood
for that curse–born whale
that glides the valleys
of the deep,
the one they’ve come to call

Moby–Dick.

A giant white Leviathan,
a harbinger of death,
all scarred and stuck
with harpoons forged in blood.
This captain would have only
one intention
to find and kill that damn

White Whale

that had left him as a
peg–leg from a previous encounter
but in the end, the whale
would win the day
and take that fated captain on
his last Nantucket sleigh–ride
while pinned to his side
like a bloody harpoon.

He was one now
with the giant white whale
Moby–Dick
on his descent to
the depths of a watery grave
with only Ishmael
left to tell the tale
of that great white whale.

And so it comes to be
until the sea gives up her dead
on that final day of judgment.

–Finis–

Moby–Dick: Warner Bros, 1956