Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

STANLEY KUNITZ—HIS NETTLED FIELD, HIS DUNE GARDEN 207

wife in curlers, “beach buggies with assorted yelping dogs.” Against that motley
crew, and still speaking to the whale, Kunitz gives his attentiveness:

crushed by your own weight,...

you bared your fringework of baleen,

a thicket of horned bristles.

Despite its “hoarse and fitful bleating” he won’t moralize.

Somebody had carved his initials

in your flank. Hunters of souvenirs

had peeled off strips of your skin.

Another dawn brings “your unearthly outcry,”

Stanley Kunitz, Wellfleet Whale, 1966.

Stanley Kunitz, The Wellfleet Whale and Companion Poems

(New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1983).