NEWS FROM ANTARCTICA

by Pepper Trail

The enormous A68a iceberg which broke off from Antarctica in 2017 and has been drifting dangerously close to the island of South Georgia recently is starting to fall apart. New images from the RAF show how fragments of the once largest iceberg in the world are breaking away from the main bulk of the berg... Experts [are] growing concerned about the impact it could have on the island's unique biodiversity. —The Daily Mail (UK), December 24, 2020

From south of our imagination, the news:

There is a wild island of stone, South Georgia

Rough paradise of penguin and seal

And an equal island of ice, coded A68a

Broken from Antarctica, drifting free

 

Northward, the ice turns slow in the gyre

As if the wind and the salt currents

Sensing the land where the horizon bends

Shepherd the ice toward that meeting

Two giants so close-matched, sea-battered

 

On the rocky shore, the day approaches

When penguins and sea-elephants will see

What the albatross and the satellite know

The white wall coming to close off the world

The ice grinding to a halt against the stone

 

Perhaps there will remain a wave-churned strait

A path of escape into the abundant depths

Or perhaps the ice and stone will fuse

And a hundred thousand penguins

Denied the sea, will starve, day by day

 

There is nothing to be done

And even for those of us who know the Ice

Have walked with penguins to the water's edge

This makes no black mark, no blot

In the ledger of our responsibilities

 

Yes, the climate changed and the ice shelf cracked

But the blow I struck, it was the merest touch

The same for you, and for you, in our billions

All, light as feathers tumbling across a beach of bones

Then borne aloft on the eternal wind, and gone

Pepper Trail is a poet and naturalist based in Ashland, Oregon. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, Atlanta Review, Spillway, Kyoto Journal, Cascadia Review, and other publications, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net awards. His collection Cascade-Siskiyou was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry.

THE ANTARCTICA BEAUTY PAGEANT

by Christopher Woods

Temperature in Antarctica soars to near 70 degrees, appearing to topple continental record set days earlier. —Headline in The Washington Post, February 14, 2020


Has fewer contestants this year.
Girls from every continent once competed
Before the heat became too intense.
No more bikini strut, wet tee shirt parade.
Now just a few stagger about in a white furnace
Where the fevered winds that killed the penguins
Blow incessantly across the bones of elephant seals.

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Chappell Hill, Texas. He has published the novel The Dream Patch, the prose collection Under A Riverbed Sky, and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. His photographs can be seen in his gallery. His photography prompt book for writers From Vision To Text is forthcoming from Propertius Press.

O'BRADY CROSSES ANTARCTICA

by Fran Davis

"Crossing Antarctica: How the Confusion Began

and Where Do We Go From Here"—ExplorersWeb, January 9, 2019

ice   ice   ice
     solo man
sastrugi  beat  your heart
                 the sled   your life
up  and  over
ridge  and  trough

sky  and  ice
meld  to  white
     muscles only
                  read   the miles
ridge  and  trough
ice  shelf  sings

arctic  sleep
frigid  fingers flex
      grip  the  dream
                twenty-five below
up  and  over
ridge  and  trough

why  why  why
     solo man
in  deep flow state
                    sastrugi  beat
the  losing  ice  
yield  to  frozen  heart

Fran Davis writes a column for Coastal View News in California. Her work has been published in TheNewVerse.News, travel books, periodicals and numerous print and online journals.

WE BOMBED IRAQ SIX DAYS AFTER PARIS FASHION WEEK

by Clara B. Jones

New photographs show the Unites States Air Force preparing for strikes on ISIS targets at a secret military base in the Persian Gulf. Daily Mail, Feb. 26, 2016. Getty Images Photo via Daily Mail.

Climate crescented when Anthropocene
overwhelmed Antarctica, displacing
penguins whose food no longer swelled

the ocean, each year of our lives displayed
in glass cases cleaned every day, reflecting
a day-glow billboard sign selling scale

models of maps more detailed than the
landscapes they defined, so finely drawn
that cities looked like flies fixed in pixels.

The secret to my cat's success is her element
of surprise—clowns jumping out of bomber
jets, boreal birds barreling into bathrooms,

babies speaking sentences. In 2003, we
bombed Iraq six days after Paris Fashion Week.
Now we have drones to keep runways safe.


Clara B. Jones is a retired scientist, currently practicing poetry in Asheville, NC. She is a staff writer for the poetry journal, Yellow Chair Review. As a woman of color, she writes about the “performance” of identity and power and conducts research on experimental poetry. Her poems, reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous venues.

KEEPING VIGIL

by Emily Strauss


Earth Day is April 22

Today I saw a photo
of deep-winter Alaska
with brown dirt exposed
in the sledding track

and a fissure in the ice
of Antarctica long enough
to calve an massive ice floe
the size of Tahitian Peleliu

where the broken bones
of Japanese soldiers
were found in dark caves
seventy years later

sardines on the Oregon
coast are decimated
by over-fishing, ninety
percent are gone now

a single almond needs
a gallon of water to grow
times a million acres
the land now shriveled

another photo reveals
a twelve-foot python
imported to the Everglades
feeding on raccoons

ignorant of the threat
of a Burmese invader
part of the billion-dollar
exotic pet trade nearby

the air pollution meter
today read 168, only
unhealthy— increased
aggravation of heart, lungs

premature mortality
in the elderly forecast
for those regularly exposed
stay indoors, watch TV

I watched the sky striated
with clouds at sunset tonight,
streaked with corals, reds
coloring us over, keeping vigil


Emily Strauss is a teacher, newspaper reader, concerned citizen, and yes denizen of many poetry pages.