Tag Archives: polar exploration

Polar explorations

Our lives are lazy polar explorations.
Our kit is safely stowed; the trade winds blow,
and so we’re swept towards our destination.

Adventure’s guaranteed. No deprivations:
warm tents, down sleeping bags; cook fires glow.
Our lives are lazy polar explorations:

we botanize, sketch, study rock formations;
swig beer, sport beards and watch the lichen grow;
and on we’re swept towards our destination.

Our routes are mapped. No room for deviation:
we’re headed north, relax, go with the flow.
Our lives are lazy polar explorations

until the compass whispers transformation,
a world of wind and ice and things below,
and down we’re swept towards our destination:

fear, disbelief, rage, hacked off limbs, starvation –
And now as white turns black at last we know…
Our lives are lazy polar explorations –
and so we’re swept towards our destination.


A word of advice

When continents of
black ice close in

and, pressed against the wall
of your cave, you succumb

to the darkening embrace
of your very own Ice Age:

hibernate.

Hibernate.

Hold on till a ray
of the newborn old sun

slants in at the mouth of the cave
and, like a latter-day Stanley,

shakes your pale hand with a smile
of triumphant exhaustion.

Relief, it will say, is at hand
just around the next berg.

But, hey – watch it
as you stumble half-blind into thin light:

the polar bears are famished
and you don’t know where

beneath that smooth white expanse
the abyss is getting ready

to pounce.