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.
