Glacier
I overspill the high corries
where the snow accumulates,
breaks down, suffers ablation.
Over the decades, the millennia,
ice slows and fankles
due to my weight.
My skin extrudes nunataks,
shears away to crevasses;
I extend glassy gantries over
moulins of meltwater.
I am relentless, ever
descending the slopes
where my firn abrades the stones
and scree from the substrate;
I scour the basalt bedrock,
pluck blocks into my stream.
Sediments of all sizes
pepper my load.
Basally I leave moraines
and drumlin fields,
passing chatter marks,
kames and eskers;
and having furrowed fjords,
calve hull-splitting bergs.
A chinese-malaysian living in London, L Kiew earns her living as an accountant. Her debut pamphlet The Unquiet came out with Offord Road Books in February 2019. She was a 2019/2020 London Library Emerging Writer.