paperboats

ISSUE TWO: BY STONE. BY WOOD. BY WATER.
Kathleen Jones

Kathleen Jones

Imagine a world without ice

 

Imagine endless blue, imagine an absence dumb

with extinction – polar bear,  penguin, walrus, whale – 

 

unfrozen oceans where once you could walk from 

shore to shore. Then imagine the absence of cool, 

 

imagine having to imagine the drip, drip of glaciers, 

or ice-bergs the size of a hundred Titanics.  Now

 

imagine the absence of language for this – frost

floe, glacier, icicle, arctic, the Inuit words for snow – 

 

the loss of flake, blizzard, drift, white-out, 

and the present tense of the verb ‘to ski’.

 

Imagine the lack of glitter, ice-patterned glass, 

the creak and crack of winter puddles, the clink

 

and dazzle of crystals hanging from a lip of rock. 

 

 

 

 

Header Image Credit: Merryn Glover

Kathleen Jones
Kathleen Jones

Kathleen Jones is a poet and biographer living in the Lake District – a passionate environmentalist. Author of four poetry collections: Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21, Templar Poetry 2011, The Rainmaker’s Wife, Indigo Dreams 2017, Mapping Emily, Templar 2017, and Hunger, Maytree Press 2022.

www.kathleenjones.co.uk