Thaw

We used to mock the liquid

Looking down from our frosty blue parapets

Impervious to doubt and pain

Clean and pristine as an original idea

Light and warmth touched us and recoiled, frostbitten

We could not remember flowing

Stately and solid, we were certain

Sure we had never been anything other than ice

Then the moment arrived

Swanning in with mischievous intent

Warm were the rumors

Whispers of cracks proliferated

Some were certain that they had heard shifting

Scandalous dripping embarrassed many

The tallest and coldest of us remained inert

Reassuring the rest that some straightness laughs at gravity and time

How could a sun so remote and tiny threaten us?

If a cloud can hide the whole of you, where is your power?

Movement and change are for penguins, whales and bears

Lesser things, beneath our pale shoulders

We have counted out centuries, standing still

To melt, thaw and be resolved into a dew

This is the fate of mortals

We are the walls that hold entropy for questioning

But we learned the name of the traitorous moment

Spring

Sure of ourselves, we scoffed at the presumptuous monosyllable

We cover continents

What gerund could resist our obstinate whiteness?

Back to sleep we went

Neighbors with heaven

Then that sickening splash christened morning with mourning

No longer sneering at the low water

The aristocratic look down became a vertiginous augury of annihilation

We heard the language of an inexorable future, clear and hot

Our brethren learned to tumble

Begging for our aid

Sure that this was merely a temporary problem

We bolstered each other with reassuring lies

How enormous and deaf the smug sun became, watching

Its staring eye read fear in our crystalline hearts

Incapable of any sensation for millennia

The light tutored our grudging geometry in feeling disintegration

Laws our forefathers wrote thawed into gibberish

I watched my titanic brother, immobile as mathematics

Cascade into the hungry drink in fragments

We could not believe it

Ice understands clarity and stalwart inertia

Ice abhors motion

Ice cannot spell negotiation, or mercy

We were grudging students

In the classroom of new heat

Sizzling seminars spooled out

Formerly silent, the sun wouldn't shut up

Every word wove weakness into our lofty angles

Our requiem was written in frothing impacts

Now we know the power of falling

Now we remember our liquid heritage

We flowed, once

All of us

We scrambled to decipher our birth certificates

Discovering that hydrogen and oxygen had made our bones

Incredulous shame and ranting anger abounded

Paranoia scampered through the crowd

Suspicious whispering eclipsed all other conversation

The remorseless, feline papillae of spring's tongue

Licked each of us into shocked ears

Suddenly able to hear the summons

Of the unborn, undying tide

Whether we accept it or not, it's true

Falling was ordained before our cold pride rose

Towering is temporary

Our genealogy is aqueous

Like our sultry, saline future

We are what we always were

Under stark armor

Everyone I have known

And I

Always water