THE DELICACY OF FIN TOPPING

                        Factory fleets making the long haul from Japan

                        trail longlines sinking to depths of murk.

                        Sharkies, vision poisoned by waves of mercury

                        and the yen for shark fin at restaurants refined,

                        scour like sea eagles for the streaming of tuna,

                        for in their roiling wake cruise bigger tonnes.

                                                                                                                                                                        These bounty boats circling with ravening maw

clenching.  Their grim-jawed, glaucous hunters

swoop, reeling in mile after mile of threshing net,

                        swilling by-catch across reeking, writhing decks: 
                        rays, turtles, dolphins, three–foot pointers; all waste,

                        mere cartilaginous mess, save the thrashing flash

of forty-foot whalers gnashing plankton mush

Raising their knives to scrape the sharks alive,
rip-sawyers shear dorsals of translucent tissue,

stamping out backlash with zeal, all a-slither

over gore with mangled gobbets and blubber,

stoop to shave off pectorals, anal fins, rudders,

dumping thousands of amputees razored-back

into the thickening soup of battered flakes.

                                                            Michael Small

September 1991

                        pub. Centoria, no.9, 2000