anticipating Iceland

anticipation:

we travel, 

at some effort, 

with some worry,

to Iceland—the land of fire and ice, 

of volcano and glacier,

where the natural world, 

from all we’ve heard,

shouts with a clarity and force

we hope to be ready for—

we saw the tip of Greenland below us as we flew here,

ice and snow, white and strong below the plane,

an appetizer for the main course before us,

we want to see glaciers, volcanos:

a small caldera leaped up at me as we start to land!

I want to see waterfalls, whales,

whatever Nature releases into what can seem the forest

when I want to be there to hear the sound,

I hope my individual consciousness and its perceptions

will help create the reality of a glory

that seems to be the gift of this land,

how wonderful that here half the people

wake up to the truth of faerie,

unlike what progress had done to many other places

where it has reduced the universe to abstraction and lines,

and then into the denial of the other,

that Narcissus shouts in our politics,

and in our obsession with our senses.

by Henry H. Walker

August 3, ‘17