by Anne Gruner
Global AI race makes Greenland's critical minerals a tempting target —NBC News, January 17, 2026
Frozen for millennia,
your ice melts faster and faster,
the shiny shield that protects you
from the sun, reflecting its rays,
like armor deflecting spears, arrows,
and swords but not outrageous fortune.
Invulnerable for ages, your permafrost
softens, disgorging its methane and carbon
to fuel the global bonfire of the vanities.
Ancient microbes, freed from glacial captivity
create black holes of “giant” viruses,
standing ready for missions of good or evil.
Fresh and cold, your newly born meltwater
floods the warm salty ocean,
and like a hormonal imbalance,
it slows the sea's circulation,
a fateful harbinger.
As your ice bids its long farewell,
you say hello to a new peril,
one from humanity, which may transmogrify
your beauty into toxic mountains of sludge, acid,
dust, and runoff from crushing, grinding,
and chemical bleaching for coveted minerals
and a cesspool of data centers, accelerating
your blackening, melting, warming,
and death.
For the first time in human memory
you have shed tears on your highest peak,
weeping for the Earth.
Anne Gruner is a two-time Pushcart nominee whose poetry has appeared in numerous print and on-line publications including Amsterdam Quarterly Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Honeyguide Literary Magazine, The New Verse News, Humans of the World, Spillwords, and Written Tales. Her fiction and non-fiction can be found in Dogwood, Rhapsody of the Spheres, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, Hippocampus, and others. A former CIA analyst, Anne lives in McLean, Virginia with her husband and two golden retrievers.
