When we tell of this, the we that remains
five hundred years from now, our storied glacier
will be so small. Who could imagine this
great being of ice scored with huge crevices?
We’ll say that glaciers were white, because
we won’t imagine that ice becomes blue
as the weight of it presses out centuries
of air. We won’t remember gray moraines
comprised of stones rounded by the rolling
of so much power advancing and retreating.
We won’t tell of rivers a shade of turquoise
that stuns the eyes, carrying glacial flour
and ice’s breath to the sea. And those huge
boulders left in the middle of fields, we’ll
imagine that men put them there for some
reason. We’ll have forgotten how the tongues
of glaciers could rearrange the earth. We’ll
have forgotten how a glacier could tell a story
that reminded us of how small we are,
how brief our lives that misunderstood forever.
—
Erin Coughlin Hollowell is a poet and writer who lives at the end of the road in Alaska. She is the author of Pause, Traveler (2013) and Every Atom (2018), both published by Boreal Books, and Corvus and Crater from Salmon Poetry (2023). She has been appointed a 2022-2025 Black Earth Institute Fellow. She is the executive director of Storyknife Writers Retreat and director of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference.
