Recent Poem I published

I have been crafting this poem for 6-7 years. It has faced dozens and dozens of rejections that I have lost count. It has changed, been edited and refined over and over. In this poem that was published on May 26th in The Avocet: The Journal of Nature Poetry I explore the universal feeling of heartbreak and how a glacier moves through a landscape. The poem teaches science and natural history through images of loss and hope.

After the Last Glacier

The guilt of our relationship

weighs heavy upon me,

Once cradled high in

the basin of your heart,

Now, I am a hanging

glacier as it recedes.

Carving out a cirque, an arete

is left as our two hearts shift apart.

Sliding towards rock bottom

I pluck selected memories.

Carrying them until they become burdens then

when finished I drop them as erratic boulders.

I plow down the hillside

grinding down mountains

that form lateral moraines of

shared history on the sides.

Carving out U-shaped glaciated valleys

with till that still seem to be for me.

Thick, deep crevasses crack in

the surface of my unwilling release.

Tears from your firm recession

creates a small turquoise-colored tarn.

Anger at my patterns

causes the ice mass to calve.

Huge thundering booms pierce

the uncomfortable silence here.

Collapsed from within,

the love warmed too soon.

In solitary moments, my longing spills over

in cascading necklace waterfalls as relapse returns.

Over time, the pain's snout soft-

ens the land as a ribbon lake forms.

Nearer the ocean, the hurt drips

and disappears into the fjord.

Although, we were seasonal

the forgetting seems geological.

Looking back berry shrubs and wildflowers

thrive again on the sides of the scoured bedrock.

The misfit stream looks out of place but

all signs point to the disturbance that shaped it.

And this love will converge even

after the last glacier is gone.

Benjamin Alva Polley - Whitefish, MT - [email protected]