hale
was balding. He was embarrassed around the other whales so he hung out on the
surface of the ocean, spouting sadly. Bird saw that Whale was sad and so he
flew between Sun and Whale and covered Whale’s bald spot with his shadow. Whale
had never been so happy. Then Military Airplane flew into Bird and Bird was turned
into feathers. Later, Military Airplane bombed a town but Whale never found out
and so he remained happy until the end of days.
Moral: Wear a hat and support journalists.
Since they were always fighting, they asked their mom to help.
She tried all sort of things, but nothing stopped the kerfuffle. So, she locked them in their room.
“This way they will have to work it out,” their mom said.
Many things changed over the years. The alignment of continents. The acidity of the oceans. The climate. Ape evolved into an early form of human but Joy and Sorrow remained the same.
Moral: joy and sorrow remain the same.
The author of twenty-two books of poetry and fiction, Gary
Barwin is the author of the nationally bestselling novel, Yiddish for
Pirates (Random House) which won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian
Jewish Literary Award and was a finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary
Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His poetry includes For It is a
Pleasure and a Surprise to Breathe: New and Selected Poems, ed. Alessandro
Porco (Wolsak and Wynn, 2019) and A Cemetery for Holes, a poetry
collaboration with Tom Prime (Gordon Hill, 2019), and, forthcoming, Muttertongue
(a CD and recording with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts, Book*hug). A new
novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy
will appear from Penguin Random House Canada in 2021. garybarwin.com