My Poetry Corner August 2025 features the poem “Why Whales are Back in New York City” from the poetry collection Whale Aria by Rajiv Mohabir, published by Four Way Books (USA, 2023). His fourth book of poetry received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Forward Indies, Bronze Medal from the Northern California Publishers and Authors, and finalist/Honorable Mention from the Eric Hoffer Award. All following excerpts of his poems are from this collection.

A queer poet, memoirist, and translator, Mohabir was born in London, England, to Indo-Guyanese parents: descendants of East Indian Indentured laborers to then British Guiana. Migrating to the USA as a kid, he grew up in New York City and Florida’s Greater Orlando Area. He holds a BA from the University of Florida in Religious Studies, an MSEd in TESOL from Long Island University of Brooklyn, and an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from Queens College of the City University of New York. He received his PhD in English from the University of Hawai‘i. He is currently an assistant professor of poetry in the Department of English at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Whale Aria was conceived in Hawai‘i after the poet first heard humpback whales singing to each other. “I felt it in my pituitary gland first. Then in my throat. A tightening and a deep reverberation,” said Mohabir in his craft essay “On Humpback Whale Song and Poetic Constraint,” published in The American Poetry Review, July/August 2023 Issue.

“Submerged, I opened my eyes and felt the song move through me. What they communicated to one another was a mystery to me, as it is to scientists still, but felt familiar in that it was as if the vibrations stimulated the noise production mechanisms of my own body…. It felt holy, like the cetacean vibrations were sacralizing the space through sound. I wanted to hear the songs again and again and again.”

In the poem “Underwater Acoustics,” we learn (p. 47): Once you immerse yourself in unending strains / the tones will haunt you: // ghosts spouting sohars you’ve called / since childhood.

The ghosts spouting sohars may refer to his father’s rejection when he was a boy, expressed in the poem “Boy with Baleen for Teeth” (p. 7): My father wished / to cast me back- / wards caste and all: / a wrong catch, / saffron amniotic / dripping off my black / whalebone gown.

[Note: Sohar is a Hindi word referring to a song sung by Indian women to celebrate the birth of a male child.]

Mohabir became so haunted by the whale songs that, after returning to New York City, he began having dreams with whales. He told Ashna Ali and Divya Victor, during an interview for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW) podcast on May 16, 2024: “Like one whale opened its mouth and I went inside of its mouth, and it closed it, and then we dove deep into the water. And our consciousnesses kind of merged into one, so I was whale, and I was Rajiv. Which was a really moving dream.”

For a brown-skin queer individual, living on the margins of our society, Mohabir’s feeling of oneness and acceptance with the whale was truly transformative. This union between the human and whale consciousness is evident throughout his collection. The poem “Immigrant Aria” is a beautiful example, in which the human/whale speaker interweaves the pain and violence of colonialism and imperialism experienced by both the whale and brown-skin immigrant (p. 13):

         … Once Empire
shackled you. Once you answered
        to monster, to dragon, spewing steam, fire

bellowing in the furnace of your hide,
        a migrant captured for brown skin’s
labor. Somewhere inside the darkness

        where brews flame, a spirit hovers
over the deep. Once before Adam named
        you illegal you snaked, breaking

into air. Spit out his poison, jaw-clap
        the swell… In the beginning,

        you were formed with great light.

[Learn more about the poet’s unusual rhythmic poetic scheme, based on the “rhyme” of the humpback whale songs, in his craft essay “On Humpback Whale Song and Poetic Constraint.”]

If you’re unfamiliar with the Pacific whaling industry in the nineteenth century, I recommend that you check out the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary website.

In “Plastivore,” the human/whale speaker addresses our shared threat from human plastic waste in the oceans (p. 86):

        Pick a pectoral peck of polycarbonate
particulates. Wreath the shoal
        in bubble nets, open your teeth.

Swallow polyvinylidene
        chlorides, polymides, poly-every-
kind of toothbrush to scrub

        baleen, and micro-dot hand wash.
[…]

He concludes that all that remains of human bone dust is a polyethylene pile.

The featured poem, “Why Whales are Back in New York City” (pp. 97-98), takes words from the article of the same title by Kendra Pierre-Louis, published in Popular Science on June 7, 2017. The article explains the importance of the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 in cleaning up the major waterways of New York City.

In the opening two stanzas of the ten-stanza poem, the human/whale speaker describes the water pollution that drove the whale and other marine species, such as menhaden mentioned in the poem, from the New York coastline.

After a century, humpbacks migrate
again to Queens. They left
due to sewage and white froth

Banking the shores from polychlorinated-
biphenyl-dumping into the Hudson
and winnowing menhaden schools.  

The water is now cleaner for bathers to return to the seaside, to submerge and listen to the whale songs, as well as view a black fluke silhouetted / against the Manhattan skyline (stanzas 3 & 4).

Stanzas five to eight transports us to the neighborhood known as “Little Guyana,” located along a section of Liberty Avenue in Queens, New York City, where Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Trinidadians have established a Caribbean cultural community. While the humpback whales grace the shoreline of Queens, brown-skinned “illegal” human bodies face deportation. [Note: This would’ve been during our Dear Leader’s first administration (January 2017 to January 2021).]

Now ICE beats doors
down on Liberty Avenue
to deport. I sit alone on orange

A train seats, mouth sparkling
from Singh’s Roti Shop, no matter how
white supremacy gathers

at the sidewalks, flows down
the streets, we still beat our drums
wild. Watch their false-god statues

prostrate to black and brown hands.
They won’t keep us out
though they send us back.

The human/whale speaker is not diminished by intolerance. Rather, to live within this changing seascape/landscape is an act of endurance. Then, taking us back to the depths of the ocean, the poem ends on a high note (stanzas 9 & 10): the miracle of the returning humpback whales.

I fear that the well-being of our humpback whales is not secured. The same is true for all other living creatures, human and non-human alike, that inhabit our planet. As the Masters of Industry continue to turn back the tides of environmental protections, put in place since the 1970s, there will be consequences.

An article published a week ago in The Independent caught my attention, reminding me that all is not well in our oceans. “Blue whales — the largest animals on Earth — aren’t singing as much anymore, and that’s got scientists concerned,” said reporter Graig Graziosi. Learn more about the threats they face.

To read the complete featured poem, “Why Whales are Back in New York City,” and learn more about the work of Caribbean American poet Rajiv Mohabir go to my Poetry Corner August 2025.