Poem for Tuesday and Orca Sightings

Whale Song 

By Joseph Edwards Carpenter 

I

Oh! the whale is free of the boundless sea,

He lives for a thousand years;

He sinks to rest in the billow's breast,

Nor the roughest tempest fears:

The howling blast as it hurries past,

Is music to lull him to sleep,

And he scatters the spray in his boisterous play,

As he dashes the king of the deep.

Oh! the rare old whale, 'mid storm and gale,

In his ocean home shall be,

A giant in might, where might is right,

And king of the boundless sea!

II

A wondrous tale could the rare old whale

Of the mighty deep disclose,

Of skeleton forms of by-gone storms,

And of treasures that no one knows;

He has seen the crew, when the tempest blew,

Drop down from the slippery deck,

Shaking the tide from his glassy side,

And sporting with ocean and wreck,

Then the rare old whale, 'mid storm and gale

In his ocean home shall be,

A giant in might, where might is right,

And king of the boundless sea.

III

Then the whale shall be still dear to me

When the midnight lamp burns dim,

For the student's book, and his favourite nook,

Are illumed by the aid of him;

From none of his tribe could we e'er imbibe

So useful, so bless'd a thing;

Then we'll on land, go hand in hand

To hail him the ocean king,

Oh! the rare old whale, 'mid storm and gale,

In his home will ever be,

A giant in might, where might is right,

And king of the boundless sea!

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My Tuesday was pretty quiet, since I had a lot of photos to upload and a lot of laundry to sort. It had clouded up by afternoon, but we walked to the beach past the blooming daffodils, though the eagles that were in the tree over the deck in the morning had gone to hide. 

My Voyager group watched the quite-good "Collective" (the episode in which Icheb arrived), then Paul and I watched the end of the second season of All Creatures Great and Small and the wedding at the start of the third season. Orcas we saw on Friday: