Hall's Bay is a china plate.
I skate far out to the breathing hole
where the men chop the ice away.
The echo of auger and axe
grapples the lip of hills.

They are building a lung for whales -
a pair of humpbacks, a narwhal
surfacing through the slush.
The little narwhal lingers,
mottled back steaming.
Its eye oily in the dark cup,
me mirrored in the eye-slick,
the horn spiralling into brittle air.

Carol Hobbs

Narwhal appears in The Backyards of Heaven: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from Ireland and Newfoundland & Labrador jointly published by the School of Humanities Publications, Waterford Institute of Technology, Centre for Newfoundland and Labrador Studies and Scop Productions Inc.

CAROL HOBBS is the Administrator for PoemWorks. Her writing has appeared in journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, and Ireland. She was awarded a PEN New England Discovery Award 2004 for her poetry manuscript, New Found Laude.