birthing a poem

Poems can be like snapshots capturing a single image, or a series of movie frames telling a story. What makes them different from prose is the language, the room left for the reader to bring their own experience.

Poems can strike any time, or that’s how it is with me. Like a flash, an image or phrase shines brighter than those around it. I scrabble to capture the thought, knowing that the technical details and the perfect spelling etc can wait.

‘Iceberg’ is a poem with its genesis in a school project. My son was researching food chains in the Antarctic for a school assignment. The resource books he used also talked about icebergs, using familiar descriptors in ways new to me. I began listing words and phrases, like ‘calving’ which describes the moment an iceberg is born, ‘grandfather blue’ and ‘cheeky growler’. As my son documented food chain hierarchy, I developed this poem about the life cycle of an iceberg.

Iceberg

In a blue Antarctic dawn
an iceberg calves –
shears from a glacier
and is released to the sea

sharp and angular
it hoards ancient weather
layers of ice clothing
a coat for each year volcanoes blew
and black ash fell like snow

deeply it sits
silent peaceful
innocent whale
deadly danger

storms blow
tides swell
nights fall and fade
age blunts the underwater blades
wind softens the face

the iceberg travels on
past old grandfather blues
and cheeky growlers
to finally fall and sleep
on a drift of fragile ice flowers