Poem of the week this week comes from David Harsent’s Fire Songs, published by Faber. Fire Songs won the 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize. You can hear David reading from his collection here.
‘Icefield’
A place of ice over ice, of white over white
and beauty in absences. There was a time when the only sound
was the wind calling its ghosts, when the skyline was set
clean as a scar on glass, when your heartbeat slowed
with the cold, when your dreams brought in a white bird
on a white sky and music that could only be heard
from time to time on the other side of night.
Now the horizon’s a smudge; now there’s a terrible weight
in the air and a stain cut hard and deep in the permafrost.
Breakage and slippage; the rumble of some vast
machine cranking its pistons, of everything on the slide;
and the water rising fast, and the music lost.