Ice Age A year of losses and loneliness – and for some, despair. We’re all still grieving for someone – and I’m still living in fear. A new kind of climate change – trees alive with birdsong, but a feeling of lead in the air. A sky that should dazzle the eye – but a veil of mist even there. A poet once said the lost are like this – frozen in spirit, caught in ice. How to break free, get to live twice? I tell myself the birds came back long ago from the frost. Somehow they managed to nest, even on glaciers. I love the thought of them snuggling, breast to breast, wing to wing. It’s how one survives an age like this – how one keeps alive the fire to sing.
Adrian Schnall is a retired physician and Professor of Medicine (Case Western Reserve U.) whose poetry has been published in Pathogens and Immunity, Poetica, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. His poems have been selected for public readings by Choral Arts Cleveland, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Lit Youngstown, Lit Cleveland, and the Island Writers’ Network at Hilton Head. He lives in Beachwood, Ohio.
Amethyst Review 