Poem: "The Click-Whistle of Cthulhu"

This poem came out of the December 7, 2010 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by prompts from aldersprig and marina_bonomi, plus conversations with my partner Doug and I think fayanora and some other folks.  It has been sponsored by fayanora and marina_bonomi.

The worldbuilding context is, of course, the Cthulhu Mythos.  The poem's title is a riff off the original story "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft.  You may want to read about Cthulhu and the sunken city R'lyeh.  I also researched cetaceans and whalesong to find out which species would appear in the vicinity of R'lyeh and who would be doing what.  Basically, I figured that cetaceans might have a very different experience in R'lyeh and relationship with the Elder Gods than humans would, because their perceptions and thought patterns are so unlike ours ...

When the fishermen harassed the dolphins
and the whalers hunted the whales,
the harried cetaceans of the South Pacific took refuge
in the cold dark waters around a sunken city.

There they discovered R'lyeh
and they swam through its non-euclidean spaces
with the greatest of ease.
There was nothing there to confuse them:
they were accustomed to thinking in multiple dimensions.
There was nothing there to frighten them:
they were familiar with the ways of whalers and trawlers.
There was nothing there that they could not pronounce:
they happily click-whistled their way through
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

They came together in the shelter of R'lyeh,
whose puzzled passageways delighted the dusky dolphins,
whose doors and avenues were wide enough for the blue whales.
At first the southern right whales cowered deep in the fortress,
but eventually even they began to relax.
The blue whales and the humpbacks sang to each other
in amphitheaters shaped like dreams.
The sperm whales dove deep into a crevice where they found
the sleeping, mountainous form of an Elder God.

Excited whalesong woke Great Cthulhu from his deathslumber,
surrounding him with multidimensional images.
He stretched his tentacles and shook out his scales
and waved amiably to the large enthusiastic creatures crowding around.
He was not best pleased to hear about
the ghost nets and the exploding harpoons.

So Great Cthulhu sang back to the cetaceans
and taught them sorcery and quantum mechanics
and sent them back to the surface
where the hunters and whalers lay waiting.

The swimmers wove their own nets of cosmic strings
and launched their own harpoons of horror,
sinking the ships to lie in a ring of rusting wreckage
around the walls of lost and found R'lyeh.

They captured some of the humans in sorcerous bubbles
and brought them down to Great Cthulhu
who shelled their minds out of their brains like so many shrimp.
The Elder God fed, and grew stronger,
and was well pleased with his new followers.

Then the sperm whales and the blue whales and the humpbacks
set out to swim the oceans of the world and spread the word
to other cetaceans far away.  The southern right whales
and the dusky dolphins stayed behind
while Great Cthulhu turned a tesseract page
and began to teach them about the stars.