Poetry by Margaret King
Far North
A woman of snows and boreal forests,
Of unexplained light phenomena
And solitude--always, solitude.
Of days cut short and nights that last forever
And then
Days that don’t end and nights too bright for sleep--
polar--
And of unexpected bounty in a harsher land.
The siren waits for the stumbling men
Who’ve gone mad with hysteria siberiana,
Staggered here from endless steppes,
From deserts that looked like seas,
And she gives them just rewards and rich desserts--
For during their time walking a spinning earth
in search of the sun, they learned
you're just on a hamster's wheel and so they went--
They went on, they went mad, they went north.
Far North.
And still--not far enough.
And if the world is round, then
Somewhere West of the Sun
Lies East of Eden.
But the men I’ve given refuge to
Have taught me
Seeking such a place stems from madness
And leads to ruin, until
You’re washed up a shipwrecked wretch
On the furthest of the siren’s shores--
Farther north than beyond our wildest imaginings
--a latitude out of time and mind--
Where time and place is both a circle and a point.
And we watch the Northern Lights and think of the
Land of the Living
As a place where the dead walk.
And we look at our graves and we see that
Just when we think nothing lives there,
And they’re covered in blankets of snow
And buried by far more than simple dirt,
And laid in silent beds with ice for sheets,
The short Arctic summer comes and
Meadows of wildflowers grow on top, all around them,
Our bodies, our beings, providing fertile soil for life
After all.
A woman of snows and boreal forests,
Of unexplained light phenomena
And solitude--always, solitude.
Of days cut short and nights that last forever
And then
Days that don’t end and nights too bright for sleep--
polar--
And of unexpected bounty in a harsher land.
The siren waits for the stumbling men
Who’ve gone mad with hysteria siberiana,
Staggered here from endless steppes,
From deserts that looked like seas,
And she gives them just rewards and rich desserts--
For during their time walking a spinning earth
in search of the sun, they learned
you're just on a hamster's wheel and so they went--
They went on, they went mad, they went north.
Far North.
And still--not far enough.
And if the world is round, then
Somewhere West of the Sun
Lies East of Eden.
But the men I’ve given refuge to
Have taught me
Seeking such a place stems from madness
And leads to ruin, until
You’re washed up a shipwrecked wretch
On the furthest of the siren’s shores--
Farther north than beyond our wildest imaginings
--a latitude out of time and mind--
Where time and place is both a circle and a point.
And we watch the Northern Lights and think of the
Land of the Living
As a place where the dead walk.
And we look at our graves and we see that
Just when we think nothing lives there,
And they’re covered in blankets of snow
And buried by far more than simple dirt,
And laid in silent beds with ice for sheets,
The short Arctic summer comes and
Meadows of wildflowers grow on top, all around them,
Our bodies, our beings, providing fertile soil for life
After all.
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Margaret King is a Wisconsin writer who enjoys penning poetry, short stories, and young adult novels. In her spare time, she likes to haunt the shores of Lake Michigan, similar to many of her fictional characters.
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