The Song of the Ancients

Listen, friends.

Do you hear the song

of the ancient ones

floating on the breeze?

Can you hear the cries

of the wild ones?

Do you feel

all the broken human

and beyond-human hearts

sorrowing

across Mother Earth?

Let's join our energy

with that of the elders,

to sing in the mystical whales,

guardians of our collective wisdom

since the world was young.

Let's send our hearts

to the edge of the cliff,

where the wise ones have gathered

through millennia.

In spirit, let us

sing the whales into the bay,

as Indigenous people have done

through all of time.

They are waiting

for our song.

A poem inspired by Julian Lennon's song, Saltwater, and also by his film about the aborigines and the whales, titled Whaledreamers. In the film, elders from around the world gathered on a cliff in Australia, where, long ago, people sang the whales into the bay. The elders gathered, they sang....and the whales came, a moment of joy and wonder. The whales carried the memory of this tradition in their enormous consciousness.