Due North
Location
I.
A ship in the night
adrift on a lonely sea,
caught between dark waves.
---
White castles, sculpted
by Nature's determined hands,
melting in silence.
---
The pod surfaces,
calling and leaping as one:
wolves with black fins hunt.
---
Lights, dancing brightly:
luminescence, a spectrum
of ribbons flashing.
---
Spotted and speckled,
a tooth for a tusk dives deep:
legend of the north.
II.
Alabaster fur,
a living boulder recalls:
"it was colder then."
---
New-snow face, flippers
softly white, hides on hard ice,
dark eyes round with fear.
---
A hidden shadow,
ghosts of a people, now gone:
the canoe left bare.
---
Frozen chunks unfreeze,
fall with loud splashes and drift –
the ice-land waning.