On witnessing the glacier at Saint-Bernina, Switzerland, June 7, 2014

---

Snow-blinded,

it is hard to see at first

My eyes come to rest on a valley

where serene snow mass divides and forms a gelid chute

Impervious, alive yet

paralyzed.

 

White tongue of solid ice

deceptively still and silent,

but beneath static serenity

a constant rushing roar erupts from Springs

unknown beneath me.

 

This is the crime scene of unspeakable violence

(yet I have known and read and understood).

Just a few small degrees, is what my young son had said

and it will all be gone.

 

I strain to hear it, if only a whisper of its native cry –

a remnant really of

ancient time

spewed forth alive but buried silently.

 

Pristine

and clear and certain,

Sluiced sweetness sucked from depths we thought an infinite gift

entitled to us

by Nature.

 

Great glacier

moral compass,

Arctic scale

weighing the balance

of Celsius points on this green orb.

Measuring out the fractals of my life,

this cold, hard time that we are all doing,

Consuming, ravaging

wasting.

 

And strangely my mind goes to the man on Death Row,

dragging me down into that iron chamber

(yes he was someone’s son as well)

strapped down, immobilized, numbed

and frozen with

the thiopental needle.

 

The muffled animal scream,

in his throat

as nerves and muscles twitched and flinched and time stood still,

strangled agony unseen except for his mother quietly crying

across the glass.

 

Biting back icy tears

I cannot let this in,

this chilling truth –

it took nearly twenty-five minutes –

runs sick and diseased in the river of my own blue veins.

 

And mouth dry, with my face blistering in the unforgiving Nordic wind,

I remembered that he asked me “why?”

since it was my generation held responsible –

and I had no answer for this,

This stifling lie,

a mother’s craven shame.