The Nightingale | Susan Cocalis, now available from Gallery of Readers Press
A non-conformist nightingale
longed to be a great white whale
He once had heard of Moby Dick,
whose skin was white and very thick,
whose blubber never turned to flab,
in his pursuit of Old Ahab.
So for this bird in South Tyrol
the ocean’s depths became his goal.
Night after night, this bird lamented
his sad plight, how he resented
that he, an inner creature of the sea,
spent all his days stuck in a tree,
that he, a whale, had been interred
in the body of a … bird.
It was a source of constant shame
that he inhabited this frame.
He felt entrapped, as in a tomb,
forever plugged his splendid spume.
Of course, it’s true that he could fly
but Tyrol was mountainous and dry.
And, yes, he had the gift of song,
but it felt so wrong, all wrong.
He’d never cared for Keat’s Ode,
in Melville’s prose his juices flowed.
So many were the days he’d wish
for a mighty tale to swish.
Then, one day, he dared to hope
there was something to help cope:
he’d heard of sex-change operations,
which led to joyous celebrations,
where men shed their virile apparatus
to adopt a female’s status;
where women freed their inner male:
could he not free his inner whale?
But though he searched the whole world through,
no surgeon could this procedure do.
Thus he returned to his home tree.
This whale-thing wasn’t meant to be.
With time, his dreams began to pale
and he was again a nightingale.