A journey
Down the stairs as usual
A pool to the left as I descend
A long dive into the pool
I am breathing water:
No limit to the depth, no limit to my ability to dive.
It gets brighter as we descend.
Still diving, I surface in a new world,
Bright, glistening, silent,
Hushed awaiting the action,
Awaiting the actors.
The sands glisten, untrodden.
The foliage, intense dark green.
No animals, no birds, no fishes:
The scenery, not yet the players.
I am brought back to ordinary life remembering my poem from August 26, 1992, that I, knowing that something big had happened, read to my Gateway class on the Thursday, in the closing circle that December night:
New Land
The older world we grew up in,
grew old in, knew no additions
save in tiny increments. Here
and there, now and then, a Surtsey —
a dab, a morsel of volcanic rock —
hissed and shouldered its way
above the level of the vast sea
surrounding. But the sea was everywhere,
the island a pinpoint.
Now, ice melts,
poles move, oceans and lands change,
and two great parts of a buried whole
shrug off the ancient burden.
Ice melts,
hard-pinned rock recoils, and water flows.
From every interior gap, through every pass,
torrents spew outward to the sea,
sanding and battering ice mountains,
punching with bergs and floes, thundering
relentlessly toward the circling ocean.
Hours pass. Days. Weeks. Months.
Still this tremendous hemorrhage,
like water from a sack suddenly slit.
And the land appears. New land,
not buried land uncovered, but
land created in the uncovering.
Terminal moraines — deltas, peninsulas,
whole uncharted featureless countries,
dropped in the thundering, unresting,
violent hurrying. No people, yet.
No animals. No trees, or shrubs,
or even germs. But they will come.
It will be a harsh land, then a wild,
then a pleasant place, another new start.
The ice has gone. The rest will come.
— August 26, 1992