Ice
These days the permafrost is no such thing,
breeds crooked shoots, springs fingers. Ancient hands
reach out to us from ice through melting rings:
our histories disinterred from broken land.
Revenants with their bronze-age seeds, knapped flints,
vague hints of trade, origins, signs of plague.
Another hottest-summer-yet reveals
hieroglyphs embossed across the dusty fields:
earthworks, long barrows, some chieftain’s chilly tomb;
the migrant tucked into his alpine womb’s
shucked out unborn, as glaciers puddle into light.
The ice caps calve, the seas and vapours rise;
methane’s unlocking from its frozen sink.
Think things unleashed, the new abnormal, watch laden skies…
Cliff Forshaw has been writer-in-residence in California, France, Kyrgizstan, Romania and Tasmania, twice a Hawthornden Writing Fellow, and appeared at the International Poetry Festival, Nicaragua. Collections include Vandemonian (Arc, 2013), Pilgrim Tongues (Wrecking Ball, 2015) and Satyr (Shoestring, 2017).