Duck-walking on sheets of ice,
only the sky just above my lips is melting.
I move forward by counting the parked cars.
A bundled-up woman I knew from last winter waves at me,
she is way across a slithering street.
She was in service in Vietnam, she nursed,
this part of her I remember only.
Her weathered face underneath her mouth-covering scarf
is hidden today.
There is significance in this numbing landscape.
The road keeps sliding forward until it forgets us.
Ebb-less Floe
The ice floes will not return and he will never leave.
2/19/2016
submitted to – In one line (monoku #7) write what you see or feel – Poetry Contest
sponsor – Poet Destroyer A
I had lived on the ice-floe for about a year
My world had become absolutely geometric---
everything within my vision was linear.
And the whiteness had taken me past the point of madness.
Learning the language of the wetness of the wind,
of a smell in the air,
(there are no shadows on the floe),
and, beneath my feet, the ride of this frozen crust on the sea.
Nights come when the wind rages, roars, and screams in my face.
I sit, solid as I can, and face it, best I can,
trying to keep a hold on myself to the ground
Knowing if I think about it, my mind will tether its hooks to the thought
and that one little jerk in my synapse will be like my body
as the wind jerks me up and (blows) (blasts) me into the sea.
Thoughts on the floe become spare.
Feeling is frozen and Truth has become solid,
the mass of it being the very essence of the ice beneath my feet.
The (Sahara) has its women, if only in its vapors and dust devils,
But on the floe you don't think of the flesh,
and you seldom remember it,
Except that which, with bare hand and bare wit,
you can catch and rip apart with your teeth.
There are nights, though. Quiet (for the floe)
when the pain of being human and alone
sends you whimpering back to the womb,
Dying for a rebirth.
Where, stripped of every last illusion, you rage at this alien awakening,
and clothe yourself in your own unique courage.
06 February 2010
Ice Floe
The glacial epoch is now part of history
The spectacle of glacier widely seen in the Arctic
A habitat for Arctic mammals and where the trees end
This is the land of the midnight sun
A huge mass of the glacier is shrinking
Detached to become an iceberg
And now melting into chunks of an ice floe
Resembling a broken and frozen waterfall
Steller’s Sea-eagle flying over the sea
Do watch the Inuit hunter stranded on a high cliff
The orcas' graceful dive into the deep
And the flickering of an iceblink
Extremely cold slowly subsiding by this global warming
Shrinking Arctic ice and rising the sea levels
Can there be another aurora borealis to glow in many colors
While the last polar bear clinging to the top of the last piece of an ice floe