Whalebone Vessel

Maddy Ando

What wily wave of white and grit
could topple you, giant, on the flaxen sand
that crowned our island’s cairns and loam?
For whom did you hang up your dorsal fin?

It must have been us. Many’s the night
we’d carve you for feasting, for brothing, for stewing.
Amazed, untucked the baleen plates from your gums
roughened by dark winds and now to strain 
our boiled beans and turnip tops.

Yes, in all innocence we enjoyed your blubber burned 
in oil lamps and melted to waxes warm.
I imagined you always warm, always clean as I rub your
oils on my elbows and knees.
I pity the ocean that spat you out like a stone,
for you dazzle us now with your radiant bones.

In daggers and arrows and toys on the moor;
ivory, brilliant, in chubby young fists. As for me, 
a tablet on the temple wall announces that I hung 
your pendant bones at my throat, and leapt with you,
rejoicing, back to the sea.

The Science

This poem is inspired by an Iron Age whalebone vessel discovered in The Cairns broch in the Orkneys. University of the Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute MLitt student, Karen Kennedy, is working with Dr Ingrid Mainland (Programme Leader for MLitt Archaeological Studies), examining, recording, and cataloguing the animal bone fragments as part of her research into Iron Age feasting. The bone itself has offered much insight into ritualism in this period, and how a single beached whale could offer vitality to an entire community in the Iron Age. We could not have learned this without the ability to interpret DNA evidence from bone deposits, enabling a new understanding of these precious sites and what they can teach us about how people lived in the ancient world. Baleen plates are the series of fringed plates in whales' mouths that are used to strain seawater for food. These would have been removed, cleaned and then used by Iron Age communities to strain their own food.

The Poet

Maddy Ando is a Classics and Ancient History Master's student living in Manchester in the UK. Alongside classical mythology, her interests include nature and paganism. Her poetry and prose is primarily magical realism, inspired by the seasons, and myths and artefacts from the ancient world.

Next poem: Bayesian Updating: A Cyber Pastoral by Dylan Randall Wong