Whales And Eagles Poem by gershon hepner

Whales have dived and eagles soared,
but humans will continue boldly
star-trekking only till they’re bored
to death. Enthusiasms coldly,
like entropy, degenerate,
for eagle watchers lose their patience,
and few have time to venerate
the depths created for cetaceans,
for only monsters now awaken
the sleepers of the Star Wars age
whose fantasies can’t disengage
from crackpot visions of the kraken.


Michael Gorra reviews 'Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings, ' by Jonathan Raban (Pantheon) in the NYT Book Review, November 7,1999. Raban says that whereas European explorers thought of the sea only 'as a medium of access to the all-important land, ' for the Indians the hazards of the forest with its wolves, cougars and grizzlies were 'more unpredictable and less easily avoided than the maelstroms and krakens of the deep'. He writes: 'The waves may pound and the whales dive whether or not we are there to see them, but the very idea of the wild is a product of human thought, a site of human, and hence historical, meaning.'