Sea Symphonies

Steve D. Smart

Ellen’s diagram is like a child’s quilt.
I turn her checkerboard about,
swap out strident Microsoft primaries
for shades that hurt me less,
and in handling the squares,
in redrafting with attention,
I accommodate their stories.

These colours migrate
in meanings of movement,
impressionism, baroque, punk,
skiffle. Shifting cribs styled
from one mind there
to another even more far-out,
where they are, deep, diving
somewhere in exotic waters.

The song-square game is played
with cryptic southern ocean rules.
Some tunes drawl a short season,
just a few months' drift afloat.
Others, caught and re-released,
are replayed and passed Pacific,
sounding out a cetacean wave,
a year-long track of seaborne airtime.

She’s charting trends of alien voices,
just discovered whale spun folksong,
sung to some purpose, as yet unknown.
And sung untold, in all this time.

The Science

The research featured was by a team led by Dr Ellen Garland (University of St Andrews). Over 10 years of fieldwork, songs of humpback whales were recorded at locations across the South Pacific. The work demonstrated that the songs travelled in a regular west-to-east pattern over 10,000km long each year, and that songs changed year-on-year over the course of the study. Previously this phenomenon was entirely unknown. The poem is about how I came to understand a diagram representing this annual migration of whale song which I encountered when designing an exhibition about the group's research in 2019. With thanks to: Dr Ellen Garland, Dr Luke Rendell, Alex South, Natalie Sinclair, and Ken Boyd. Public engagement project supported by: University of St Andrews, Dundee Science Centre, The Royal Society.

The Poet

Steve Smart is a poet and artist living near Dundee, Scotland. He has long-standing interests in science and art. Places his poems have appeared include Atrium, Firth, The Poetry Shed, The Writer’s Café, The Curlew, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Poet’s Corner, Poetry Scotland, and others. Some projects: filmmaker/co-ordinator for ‘Poems for Doctors’, a collaboration between University of St Andrews and Scottish Poetry Library; art-science poetry film ‘TRAWL’ with Matthew Caley and Alex South for StAnza; online interactive poetry reading ‘THIS’ for StAnza/Book Week Scotland with Rebecca Sharp; Drawing breath a collection of poems about trees, with artist Tansy Lee Moir.

Next poem: Sungrazer by Marian Christie