How to Grieve a Glacier

It’s not something you can hold in your arms.

You can’t rock with its image in a blanket

and keen away the nearing pain.

That white face is distant, and cold, unrelenting

in its forward grind to the sea,

stalwart even as it thins, crumbles, pulls back

into history and oblivion.

The sun itself finds nothing to love,

save soft rivulets of water its rays release

from eons of hard frozen luck.

But I tell you I do love this blue-white giant,

and grieve its leaving, even as I thrill to watch

thunderbolts of ice crash into azure seas.

So we sit, you and I, scanning the newly revealed

and imagining what next will show itself,

what balded rock and bared shoreline,

as ice slips and pulls away in great chunks.

We know it is leaving, abandoning us

to what our kind has created,

and we know its gift of rarified water

will only bring more sorrow.

Yet it is a gorgeous deterioration.

Glowing face of one turned toward

what the living cannot see.