Isabelle Thompson

Moby dick as a sonnet

The meaning of light is a palindrome
of darkness. Even our nurturing star
turns its hand to destruction, to polychrome
blaze – cruelty is intrinsic to the flower;
is as old as life.
  In the eighteenth
century, whale oil lit the factories
and mills. The roar and cotton-thread depths,
the oceanic-mechanic arteries
of those halls, must have seemed like the stinking
belly of the animal.
When they hacked
the whale open, was its blubber twinkling
darkness? Or did the human hand, gone slack
with violence, find in that blemished oil
a scent of light, a sacred fish-blue veil?

Isabelle Thompson is a recent graduate of Bath Spa University's Creative Writing MA and now works as a research assistant at the same university. She has previously been published in Ink, Sweat & Tears and The Lake. She regularly reviews pamphlets on Sphinx.