Song of the Wadi Hitan

(didi, hope I'm posting this correctly)

Prone on the hot white sands
of the Wadi Hitan,
I slide my arms up and down
making angel wings.
The dust storm still looms;
a large grey powder puff on the horizon.
Soon it will sweep past me to Cairo,
that jeweled lady sprawled by the roving Nile.
Men and women will cover their faces.
Cats will hide beneath buildings.
Windows will take weeks of polishing
to come clean.

Deep in the sands beneath me, a whale cries.
For forty million years he has yearned
to be heard, he tells me. His flesh
has melted. His teeth are scattered
like broken pearls. His last meal
of fresh shark meat has long been digested.

He laments the loss of his ocean
and friends to hunt with when nights are cool.
Unlike the Pharaohs, Cleopatra,
and the Great Pyramids, he, alone,
has been forgotten, he says.

I don't make whale sounds, so
I can't tell him he wasn't forgotten,
can't ask what song he sang those
fourteen and more thousands of years ago;
the song that could break someone's heart
and inspire turbaned men resting
here at this very spot on camel-back
to name this place Wadi Hitan-
Valley of Whales.

Instead, I scheherazade him images
of high tumbling waves, fat sharks waiting
to be eaten, giant squid drifting under
moonless nights good for hunting.
A whale swimming free.

I hear him sigh a sigh of contentment.
The desert sleeps.


Pris Campbell
©2005