The Hastening Thaw, by Anne Hopkinson

The Salmon Are Running Free Ice Sculpture, by Jamie Wardley (UK) 2014 from Sand in Your Eye. Click image to learn more about Sand in Your Eye projects.

1.
 
Ice salmon leap ice rapids.
Airborne, these transparent, frozen fish. 
 
Salmon shine chandelier light.
Translucent in their scales. Immortal
 
as a diva’s dress in spotlight, 
a bride’s diamond flash. Mercury sequins
 
gleam on glassy bodies. Fionn licked the wisdom 
of the world from a salmon’s silver skin,
 
led the Irish to victory. Giants: our war 
against a warming world. Ice salmon
 
drip on the wedding platter. Salmon battle.
Time and heat melt. Glaciers in sun.
 
 
**

2.
 
I have walked the Columbia ice field. Each crevasse
a blue abyss. Peer in.
 
A river carries ancient sediment. Whirlpools, caves. 
Till-strewn edges, debris, dregs at the terminus.
 
The glacier retreats. Each year five metres. Dirt      
absorbing heat, quickens the thaw. 
 
In Peru, men cover Pastoruri glacier. Sawdust
shovelled from trucks. Spread by donkeys. 
 
Ice shelves soften, calve great chunks into the sea,
icebergs ever bigger, ice cap ever smaller under
 
a shaky polar vortex, an unsteady jet stream.
Skadi, goddess of winter, weakened in her realm
 
of ice and cold. Her caribou, her foxes and bears
confront the warming world. 
 

**

3.
 
What do we find in thawing ice? Mammoth,
meteorites, ice core evidence.
 
A nascent world, our atmosphere of gases
and ash. Frozen where they died: foxes,
 
diving birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, fish.
Otzi Man, murdered on a snowy Alp.
 
Juanita, Andean sacrifice, leaves
her ice grave for a museum in Argentina.
 
Where is our Goddess of Winter? Our deity
of divine cold? She who could freeze
 
glacial water, primeval, pure. For sale.
the price rising as oceans rise. 
 
Icecaps shrink at the poles. 
Ice salmon melt at a wedding dinner.
 
Watch the ever hastening thaw. 
Dance on, hot and happy.

Anne Hopkinson

Anne Hopkinson lives in Victoria BC and writes about her time in Algeria, Rwanda, and the Dominican Republic. She is president of Planet Earth Poetry, a reading series of 26 years, a nature lover, and water rat.