Artic Refuge Valley in Summer, 1973. Photo by U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Once[]
Once there was silt and gravel everywhere
And water running in great roaring floods –
No feet on earth or wings upon the air
Nor any green that could have promised buds.
There was a vast ice precipice withdrawing
Slower than snails to a glittering cold rest
About the uncertain pole while waters gnawing
At rigid rock made room for root and nest.
Then some ancestral cell now lodged in me
Went writing gaily under the glacier tongue
Pasture upon a wild uncertainty.
Now there are men. Life is no longer young.
Now there is warm flesh and warm vocal breath.
The only glacier is the shadow of death.
This poem is in the public domain