Salmon Glacier

Creative writing contest (poetry)

{description:attr_safe}
Salmon Glacier, near Stewart, B.C. Photo: Jason Ahrns/Flickr

Selected by contest judge John K. Samson as the runner up in the poetry category of our fourth annual creative writing contest. Our fifth annual writing contest will open in September 2015.

Salmon Glacier

Splay of her limbs, moose
polished clean to bone
by water so pure it squeaks.

Lower your cup to the stream,
drop below the plume,
below the feather spray of rapids.

How the river breathes
a white raven ghost, water
exhaled by the lung of the world,
north enough
to drink.

Sing the glacial
cave-call, peat and sinter,
hollow echolalia: older

than rock pestle on mortar stone,
breast plate
armouring the heart
passed down the woman line
down the valley.

Listen to the clatter –
moose tibia at the bend,
rocks at the upstream eddy,
marked

by one last
glistening thrust, salmon

scales slackened
to let the soft bits through
pulled home by the sound: ice

knuckling its own knuckles
shudders at the source,
carols the long lament
of calving off, of working
itself free.

Fabienne Calvert Filteau lives on Gitxsan territory in Hazelton, B.C., where she writes, explores mountains and rivers, and works in the field of reproductive justice. Her first book of poetry, Second Growth, was published last year by Creekstone Press. 

Readers like you keep Briarpatch alive and thriving. Subscribe today to support fiercely independent journalism.