Ice

As it pours itself backwards
up the slumping mountains--
U-shaped valley-rock glistening
in a newly remembered sun,
continents undressing in the wind,
water washing silty or clearest-blue
and braiding through the vestiges
of mountainsides, now crumbled
gravels and slag cast in dense moraines
on the dead-flat floor of the vale--
the ice is screaming that it can never die.

It lives within us now, as we melt
away the external remains
of the age of ice that gave us birth
and cradled us as we grew strong.
Too strong. Now we throw fire
at those mothering arms,
laughing, laughing as we watch
the glaciers melting into— what? The future,
hard rock, blowing dust, nothing.

Nothing. Yet still in our deeper hearts
we crouch around a fire, half-naked
and afraid, while outside, the mountain
of ice is screaming in the darkness,
groaning, shattering internally in the night,
a shadow in the deeper shadows,
a shadow in our minds. It can never die.