Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” long a favorite of mine, contains these words: Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and its fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. In the time of the COVID pandemic that began in January 2020, I was working in Manhattan, where public health sanctions kept neighbors isolated in their apartments. I thought about the spaciousness and longing for connection that whales experience deep under water, especially mother whales calling for their lost children. I remembered first hearing the songs of the humpback whales many years earlier, and wrote this song around my memory of those melodies, which are interweaved.