Poems by Elizabeth W. Jackson
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Ellesmere Island, Canada 1986
-- a photograph by Jim Brandenburg
by Elizabeth W. Jackson
From Canary Fall 2012
Elizabeth loves both the mountains and the sea and feels lucky to live between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Outer Banks.
Blue-gray mountains bank the horizon,
and thick, gray clouds line the sky. Ice fields
flow from distant glaciers, cracking
into small breakaways that cluster and float
with the on-coming storm reflected in Baffin Bay.
Springing from one ice floe to another,
a lone white wolf hovers over water—
its silhouette, a shade of the future, glassed
in the surface of the bay. Droplets
flung from its coat have sunk
into the gulf, and rings ripple wide.
Twenty years later, the Montreal Gazette:
3,000 Year-Old Ice Shelf Fractures,
the mammoth slab calving from Ellesmere
to drift away like an empty barge.
© Elizabeth W. Jackson