words by willow defebaugh
photographs by lena C. Emery
Red and green tundra grass blooming
like fire, even here. Nothing barren.
The calving boom of a glacier, an internal
collapse of a wall no longer holding.
Eerie silence, the howl of wind.
A song with no beginning or end.
Sky burning with snow, hazy gradients on stone.
This glacier has young ice, young ice, young eyes.
The cryosphere and the geosphere kiss,
caught in a dance across time.
Fifteen years. The evidence of loss.
Retreat, retreat. Why can’t we retreat?
Clay runs like tears down the mountain.
We have blood on our hands.
Stones, stones, so many stones—
every stone a story. Time tumbles onward.
It moves slower here, like it ripples off the rocks.
Oblivion embedded in ice.
A pool of tears forms on the glacier,
a hundred pools, a thousand.
A blood red rock, a rivulet running clear.
Thirty meters of loss per year.
Sun-bleached bones and spectral kelp haunt
the shore. And suddenly: softness.
The ground gives.
Tundra grass and moss made possible by
60,000 kittiwakes screaming from
the mouth of a mountain.
What is wilderness? An altar of stones.
Organic material animated by something
unspeakable. Electricity. Life pulsing unseen.
A forest of tiny trees, willows that do not
weep growing from the footfalls of giants.
Glaciers thousands of years old,
now being devoured by time.
Stability and chaos, the two wings of life,
spiraling in a cliff dive.
Hope is an iceberg with gulls circling.
White on white, too blurry to see.
What’s below the surface?
More. More. More.
A polar bear prowls the shore, a streak
of limestone set behind hungry eyes.
Waves crash unrequited against stone,
black as the night that never comes.
Light spills from the sky
at the end of the world.
What if the world has no end?
Arctic terns fly in an arrow,
bending with the curve of the Earth.
The ship rocks. Some swells you can take,
some you can’t. The rolling is a constant,
though the voyage always varies.
A river of snow carves its way between
the mountains. Sunlight shimmers
on the water, a beckoning.
Silence falls over the summit.
There is only stillness here.
Every small sound is a
question that echoes.
The planet is heating and the non-believers
will be dead before they see it. Some crimes
are too big to carry, make you want to
scream were it not for all the beauty.
Poetry flowers in yellows and greens,
swirls of orange lichen on stone.
Few have been here, few will come.
Only the scale of magnitude
can make our problems small.
There is still so much bigness to see.
The day stretches out across the tundra,
littered with caribou who couldn’t care
less that we are here. We are here.
An Arctic fox, a sliver of silver stalks a ledge.
300,000 Brünnich’s guillemots decorate a
cliff with belonging, black and white wings
taking to the sky. Feathers fall into the sea,
moments touching the surface of infinity.
Two tusks, a smooth form cuts through the water.
Testing, treading, too close, too close, this is
my home. What makes a place a home?
Family, a hundred hearts beating together
on a rock, a rock that would otherwise be barren—
except it’s not. Even an endless expanse of ice has life.
A sea of edges reveals more meaning than we could
ever muster, whispered in a single word: flow.
All life flows, even in a frozen world.
The edges crash together, an imperfect
puzzle still forming and reforming.
The skyline is a circle but we are
not the center, only a ripple.
The mind hollows floating on ice.
There is no movement
but the swell of the Earth.
The polar bear reappears in a different skin,
bearing the scars of time. He sinks his teeth
into the generous remains of a hooded seal,
painting a trail of blood in the snow.
Eyes watching us, searching for a sign:
What will we do? What will we do?
Another calving. There is no right way
to feel when watching a forgotten god fall.
A crack gives way to a fissure, a door, a gateway
in the ice waiting for us to sail through.
One wall crumbles, another appears.
What makes a heart long for what it will never hold?
Splattered red and white wings, a field of fallen
angels felled by guardians of the underworld.
Green grass made greener by the Gulf Stream,
growing over marble that many men have
tried to mine, men who will never know
how long it takes to grow good soil.
A woman with gray hair and red-rimmed
glasses says there is fierce beauty here,
beauty in not belonging to a place.
Maybe that’s what wilderness is.
A graveyard of glass, the crackling bones of a glacier.
Quiet returns, bringing with it the wind and that
ballad unbroken, unending, a melody that says:
Come, and you will finally
know the meaning of enough.
Come, and you will find purpose
as fathomless as the Litke Deep.
Come, and hear the song of the Arctic.
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Song of the Arctic
