Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Doubtful Sound

Doubtful Sound

The glacier takes to whittling
in its old age, begins to
believe that each rivulet of
the body here is a tear
deposited in the sky’s ducts.
Going back to the ocean
above becomes part
of the glacier’s plan, but
when it wakes in fear,
smaller and smaller in its
bedrock, the air tells the glacier
how its body-ice was made
to return to the beginning, as
water, as air, belonging to
its family and its future, snug
as orbit-swaddled Earth
tucked into the galaxy’s arm.

7 comments

  1. Great concern for the glaciers disappearance

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  2. I love the return to its beginning, to its family...beautiful Hannah : )

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  3. Lovely piece of sculpture that inspired this.

    The likening of the glacier's demise to the body's own withering away, the returning to the more natural state, is potent.

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  4. It's no mean feat to make a metaphysically and scientifically sound children's tale work as a poem, but you do that here. All I can add, by way of puzzle-solving kibbitzing, is that the Antarctic fish population is dramatically increasing because of climate change, which is quite pleasing in point of fact for mother earth and her charges.

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  5. in such cases should there be anything but peace? yes, even against environmental devastation, the death not being the glacier's, but our own. (i think i might grieve vaster for the earth than i do for our individual plights.)

    xo
    erin

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  6. The opening, a glacier as an old man whittling, is friggin' great. The ending, with Earth as a baby in a spiral arm, is an awesome contrast/image/idea.

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  7. I'm late to your poem, but I found it immensely inspiring. I wrote one of my own, one that explored the idea of a glacier on a weight loss plan or a self-improvements plan. My poem asks about the chunks of the self we'd love to shove into the sea, given half a chance.

    Thanks for the inspiration!

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