A Whale’s Lament

I thought that once my shadowed dorsal bent
through undulations, swimming would be spent;
descendants bask in waters far from me.
I’m a menopausal hundred-year-old granny.

The ocean sparkles glisten off my back,
as I pick at barnacles and bladder wrack.
I birthed my last calf back when I was thirty –
I’m a menopausal hundred-year-old granny.

I’m an awkward Orca floundering in the shallows,
my giant lungs no longer sound as bellows.
I’m surfing night sweats – no hormone therapyHRT for me.
I’m a menopausal hundred-year-old granny.

Kim M. Russell, 13th March 2025

Image by Thomas Lipke on Unsplash

This Thursday at the dVerse Poets Pub, we are Meeting the Bar with Poetry Form, and Grace is our host.

Grace writes that ‘complaint, sometimes called a Jeremiad, is a poem that laments or protests unrequited love or tells of personal misfortune, misery, or injustice’, but ‘may also be a satiric attack on social injustice and immorality’. A genre of poetry that has a theme of bitter sorrow, by the Middle Ages, there were loosely three types: satirical poems exposing evil in the world; didactic verse focusing on the decline of someone ‘great’; and verse lamenting unrequited love.

Grace explains that, although there is not always a specific structure identified with this genre, the Complaint made popular by Scottish poet William Dunbar (1460-1520)in his ‘Lament for Makers’ is: stanzaic, written in any number of quatrains; metered, often iambic or trochaic tetrameter; and has a rhyme scheme aabB ccbB ddbB etc. B being a refrain.

Our challenge is to write a complaint using the poetry form made popular by William Dunbar in ‘Lament for the Makers’. We may choose our own theme. I reworked an old poem about the missing Orca, Granny.

40 thoughts on “A Whale’s Lament”

  4. I love this, a wonderful whale lament and I feel for the 100 year old granny. Clever rhyming as flows without noticing it too much! So true about whales too and the purpose of the menopause so that the older females can support the pod with all their experience. Maybe the human world should take more notice of the wild world!

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  13. Menopause is a hormonal jeremiad for sure (I slept through ten years of hot flashing nights with my wife) and your fevered cetacean bears the load of it here. The compound “menopausal hundred-year-old granny” makes what would be blues truly a lament. And so solitary – so few whales left.

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  17. I love whales, I get to see them every winter as they pass through the bay where I live, so gentle and majestic. This is heartfelt and moving for me, but I also hear it as a whlae voice speaking of all who are menopausal

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