Poem of the Month

Prince Christian Sound, Greenland

We shelter from freezing winds
in sun-warmed nooks on the deck.
Indoors, the crew ladles
hot Dutch pea soup
hunked with ham into bowls.

To starboard, mountains march past
like a row of stout children
with waterfalls pinned to their jackets.
Their mountain neighbors, faces blackened
with gneiss, torsos girdled in mist,
wear witches’ hats on their peaks
as if hoping to frighten the children away.

As we watch icebergs calve
I think of the cow made of ice
in Norse myth who nourished
primeval Ymir with her milk.
The calves birthed today
are blue and translucent
as premature babies
who cannot survive.

The ice sheet, whitened
with bubbles of air in July,
deepens to aquamarine
in December. Eons ago,
glacial behemoths sheered
mountainsides slick; now,
as the icecap retreats,
its dirty fingers reach out,
grope the slopes, seeking water—
a panorama reflected, reversed,
in the blue-green glass mirror
of Prince Christian Sound.

Where one glacial digit
Dips down to the strait,
the ship pauses and rotates.
Each revolution’s a vista unveiled.
Only the clicking of cameras,
the chunk-chunk of idling engines.
Breathless and stilled,
we are seized by what Jack London
called the “white silence:”
time suspended in a caesura
of one billion years.

-Sharon Whitehill

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Sharon Whitehill is the co-winner of the NinaAlvarez.net + Cosmographia Books Poem of the Month Contest, January 2018. The other winner is Ari Gold’s poem “Fire Dancer.” The two created a lovely juxtaposition that put in me the mind of fire and ice, and that is why I broke tradition and chose two winners.

Happy New Year!

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Sharon Whitehill is a retired professor of English from Michigan, now living in Florida and attempting poetry for the first time.

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Many thanks to all those who submitted your beautiful and transcendent work.

You can still submit to the Poem of the Month Contest (ongoing), and to the Cosmographia Chapbook Contest (until Jan. 12, 2017).