Creative Coping

Inside a whale sits

Jonah, pondering

How many more rotting

Tuna he’ll

Stack up in the corner

Before he dies of

Stench and despair.

Not a scale can he see

Only slime to the touch

As the creature heaves

Through the Deep,

Filtering fish through its

Radiator teeth.

Jonah dreams out

And up, into the light

And over this rut.

cards fall on the table,

Dry, clean in the sun,

Behind the horizon,

Life’s line, noone

Can question

The silence beyond.

Always there.

Forever, back

Down fathoms and more

To our whale and

Trapped Jonah.

Never to see the sky

Split from the Land

And the sea

By the line.

There in the gut’s leviathon walls his

Murmurs sift the

Gloom for gold

But none drops.

Patience and hope

And his jaws will part

And out he’ll fight

Then float like a

Ripe apple, spongy after

The long winter store.