26 May The Thaw, By Leah Pleasants
Her hunger is a quiet thing,
etched into sunken skin stuck between protruding ribs,
an arctic coat thinned and stained,
smeared with the grime of survival.
Beneath her, the sheet of white is no longer infinite;
porcelain stretched too thin over the swell of deep waters
The world has grown smaller now,
shrinking with each shallow, laboured breath,
carried off into the wind that slices through her fur.
Northward she goes, always northward,
toward the place where the sea waits
with dark, open arms,
because instinct does not falter
even as the earth beneath her does.
As stars blink above, indifferent as ever,
her paws, once mighty, now slip on the softening ice;
when she lays down, it is without anger;
no, she does not curse the thaw.
And as the ice gives way, there is no sound,
only the ripple of her passing,
the brief tremor of a surface
that cannot remember how to hold her.