Analysis of "[The Whale Already]" by Kimiko Hahn

 Poem Found Here: "[The Whale Already]" by Kimiko Hahn

There's a couple of questions I had when I was reading this poem.

1. Why do the end of the lines need to be bolded to indicate the cento?  Is the speaker assuming I'm not smart enough to recognize it (I am, but such a blatant call out).
2. Doesn't the title look like a whale?  Words within an encapsulated form.
3. Why this Yosa Buson quote where the language conflicts ("taken got away").  Is this a translation thing or is it something else.
4. I also wonder why "a golden shovel" wasn't used in the form.  Maybe it'd be too conflicting of images.

As usual, I have no answers.  Only a curiosity. 

The tone of the poem though is less curious and more blunt, "What is endangered, the / rest of us ignore."  Such a bold statement to start out with.  By addressing the audience, the lines of the poem and the references take more of a back seat because the audience is being attacked and has to figure out how to not only deal with the claim but also how to read this poem.

"[...] The whale, / loved by children and cartoonists, already / dwindles."  These lines are leading to the taken part, but are also preparing us to the level of apathy set in reality.  Whales are endangered and even if they are loved by children and cartoonists, they're not saving the whales. 

"Bycatch has taken / them."  I didn't know what bycatch meant until I looked it up -- the left overs of the sea is taken them.  I think this line goes well with the contradiction of "taken got away" -- the act of being taken can happen, but getting away doesn't mean safe.  Whales get caught by fishing equipment -- nets and lines -- that are just left out there.  The irony of being caught for a purpose and then escaping only to be caught by the same equipment that no one is behind.

"[...] The tiny creatures they consume haven't got / a chance to outlast the warming."  I misread warming and warning the first time.  Warming is a very direct climate change reference.  And the poem continues to be very direct with the next lines, "A way / to safeguard whales is to deny ourselves the / discs and car exhaust."  This line seems a bit clunky, and I don't know why.  The tone is still there, but the language is more conceptual.  Like the speaker too is grasping at ways to save the whales but by calling out old tech like discs and car exhaust.  The poem being too self aware here it seems.

But the last line has a haiku feel -- the renso here expanding out from the perspective of the moon, "The moon / sees us at all cost alone."  I wonder if the speaker is projecting as though observing and judging like the moon.  There has been this judgmental worldly view with this poem, but the addition to loneliness from the moon indicates to me that the speaker feels alone with this point of view and can only watch.