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 OLDEST WILD BIRD, WISDOM

by Pepper Trail

An albatross named Wisdom, the world’s oldest banded bird, has returned to an annual breeding ground in the Pacific Ocean and laid an egg—at the age of at least 69. The Laysan albatross was first fitted with a leg band in 1956 by biologists studying the life cycle of the birds. It meant that she could be identified among the three million individuals that nest at the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge. —The Times (UK), December 5, 2020. Photo: Wisdom and her mate take turns for eight-hour shifts on the nest. Her return is considered a triumph for conservationists. Credit: WESSEX NEWS AGENCY

My father, gunner's mate, and your father, albatross

Somehow survived the Pacific War, and I imagine them

Inhabiting the same embattled sea, yours forever on the wing

Mine on endless watch, one day disbelieving the sight - 

No enemy, but that mythic bird, aloft

 

Postwar, your parents returned to bomb-cratered Midway

Where the stubble-headed sailors called them gooney birds

Where together they scratched a hollow between the runways

And from their ecstatic mating, their patient incubation

Hatched a chick, those sixty-nine years ago, you

 

Peacetime, safe again inside the continent, my father

Courted and married, and with his small bright bride

Produced me, firstborn, same year as you

My father's son, fated to be storm-tossed

Lover of birds, student of the albatross

 

As a youth, you were caught, handled, ringed

Given a number that began your history

Year by year, decade by decade, your life flew

Detached itself from the rest, soared above

Brought you to our notice, gave you a name

 

Wisdom, you have become a legend

But are not burdened, your endless voyaging

Simply your life, made up of days of wind

Content with the landscape of waves

Free upon your outstretched wings

 

Yet most years a moment comes that turns you back

Rearranging your feathers to seek the land

Where your mate waits, and the world waits

Today, with the news of your return, I bow my gray head

As you lift your wings and, once more, dance

 

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.

DREAMING

by Carol Alexander

The dreams unspool like newsreel in the night.
They patrol great rifts with somnambulist grace,
afraid to wake. Winds snatch up small fires.
Ships jam the locks; albatross float in the wrack.
We learned to sing the places of our origins.
Baggage mounts and scarves restrain long, blue-black hair,
 scarves  so beautifully shot with metallic threads.
The same dream dreamt, newsreel of the stunning night,
shows us  rifles, faces bearded with green foam,
the nausea of stale food in the hold.
Overnight, we learn the taste of shame.
Names pile up on documents; the syllables howl.
We thrust our bodies against the dream,
test its give, mallow stickiness of the web.
In attics children hide, clutching an almond or a fig.
Rooftops blacken in fallout; mushrooms sprout in morgues.
After the war, survivors creep outdoors like ghosts.
And in the breadlines, there is ersatz.
A giant mouth is yawning, stuffed with crooked teeth.

Carol Alexander's work has been published in numerous anthologies and literary journals such as The American Journal of Poetry, Bluestem, Boston Literary Magazine, Canary, Caesura, Chiron Review, The Common, Driftwood Press, MadHatLit, Mobius, TheNewVerse.News, Poetrybay, South Florida Poetry  Journal, Red River Review, Split Rock Review, and THEMA. Her poetry collection Habitat Lost will be published in 2017 by Cave Moon Press. Her chapbook Bridal Veil Falls is available from Flutter Press.

DEAD LAKE

by R. Nemo Hill 

LLAPALLAPANI, Bolivia — The water receded and the fish died. They surfaced by the tens of thousands, belly-up, and the stench drifted in the air for weeks. The birds that had fed on the fish had little choice but to abandon Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second-largest but now just a dry, salty expanse. Many of the Uru-Murato people, who had lived off its waters for generations, left as well, joining a new global march of refugees fleeing not war or persecution, but climate change. “The lake was our mother and our father,” said Adrián Quispe, one of five brothers who were working as fishermen and raising families here in Llapallapani. “Without this lake, where do we go?” —“Climate Change Claims a Lake, and an Identity,” The New York Times, July 7, 2016

Take from the albatross all air,
from the worm the lived loam.
On dust farms, on salt flats,
on what used to be the shore
of all that made a here of there,
leave the wingspread, the blindcurve,
leave one liftless, one unburrowed.
“I am living in someone else’s home.”

Drain all that was from all that is,
forget remembering.
Forget to float.
The past is this shrunken husk of a boat,
a souvenir woven from straw,
an orphan for sale in the marketplace.
The future’s this salt we grind and gather.
“The lake was our mother and our father.”

Take all the waters taught of tilt,
take lilt, take lap and swell and spill.
Take from the wave all that wets—
then time will harden as it crests,
our season stilled.
We could not wake one small swift fish from its stench,
or raise one bright flamingo feather from its fossil.
“We threw out our nets, there was nothing for us.”

R. Nemo Hill is the author, in collaboration with painter Jeanne Hedstrom, of an illustrated novel, Pilgrim’s Feather (Quantuck Lane Press, 2002); a poem based upon a short story by H.P. Lovecraft, The Strange Music of Erich Zann (Hippocampus Press, 2004); a chapbook, Prolegomena To An Essay On Satire (Modern Metrics, 2006); and two collections of poems, When Men Bow Down (Dos Madres Press, 2012 ) and In No Man’s Ear (Dos Madres, 2016).  He is editor & publisher of Exot Books.