2019
From the new year, dolphins began dying
by the thousands, and those were the ones we saw,
their bodies washed up on the beaches
of Northern Peru where local fishermen
in three months counted three thousand
dead, thirty corpses almost every
day. And those were the ones they saw.
We wept for the dolphins, some of us: their brains
almost as complex as ours, their play a pleasure
to watch, their pods weaving the water around
our ships. Their faces seemed to smile; they moved
in ways that made us feel, some of us,
closer to life. Now dolphin bodies, bloated,
were washing across the sands. Scientists blamed
the dolphin deaths on acoustic sensing devices
used by oil companies to map deposits.
We’d spoken against sonar, some of us;
we’d testified about effects on mammals
in the sea, on dolphins, seals, and whales. We knew
what loud sound could do, because for years,
we’d tested the effects on us; we’d used different
frequencies of sound to torture, disorient,
or kill our enemies. We’d produced sonic
bullets and grenades, sonic mines and canons,
weapons to destroy other humans’ eardrums,
or, by vibrating their eyeballs, cause
nausea or stress. We’d tried out sonic torture:
keeping another person awake with constant
noise as we beamed bangs and whistles, or music
with a beat at top volume into the mind
of a prisoner trapped inside a cell.
So many people knew about the risks.
The Zoological Society of London
had found that underwater sonar caused
the bends in sea mammals—microscopic
nitrogen bubbles forming in the blood
and vital organs, bubbles that kill brains—
but BPZ Energy,
based in Houston, started sounding out
Peru’s seabed during the very months
the dolphins died. We wanted, some of us,
to do something, but we could only watch
and weep—poor, intelligent creatures. Of course,
Big Oil had implicated us
with our taste for modern comforts and all of us
were dying from its work, which was our work too,
as we edged our cars into rush hour’s
stew of fumes and stops. Or flew to Paris.
Copyright 2019 Sandy Solomon
This is so sad and shocking. Is there anything we can do to stop this horror?
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