Five degrees colder, you plowed this valley
a mile deep. Hotter, the pine forest at your borders
will ignite. Which is to say, what’s got you this far
isn’t, for the most part, any great trick of survival.
It’s the law of averages. Who doesn’t hold out
by waiting, creeping forward in winter dimness,
receding at first light? Yet even in retreat
you are advancing, sneakily, a conveyor belt
powered by force of friction. Ice is not ice
but scribe, writing, erasing, writing, erasing,
scouring faint scratches on bedrock, hieroglyphs
of lost time. Who knows—in your blue
and otherwise lifeless streams, ancient prokaryotes
feed on the sun. All the ingredients are here.
–
Hannah Silverstein lives in Vermont and is a student in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, One Sentence Poems, Terroir Review, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM Every Day, and The New Guard.