Exit Glacier

Harding Icefield’s chilled womb pushes
the infant glacier toward the terminal
moraine sprawled on Resurrection River.
As other infants’ skull bones knit together,
Exit’s crack and cleave, blue fissures thrust in thunder.
She flings herself down from the nunataks
past heather, avalanche lilies and beargrass.
She crushes hillsides into plains,
hundred-year Sitka spruces to toothpicks,
boulders to glacial flour,
the power in her weight a blue statement
on the way to the grave.

“Exit Glacier” originally appeared in Spindrift. 

Sheryl Clough received her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she designed and taught UAF’s first writing course linked to environmental literature.  Her writing appears in Spindrift, Explorations, Storyboard, Sierra, Travelers Tales, Soundings Reviewand others.  Sheryl’s kayak adventure story “Icebergs in My Dreams” was published in the Seal Press anthology Solo: On Her Own Adventure.   Sheryl edited the new poetry anthology, Surrounded:  Living With Islands, available through Write Wing Publishing.