Book Of Days Poem by Tony Jolley

Yann Arthus Bertrand’s
Photo-Book of Days
For the 8th of January
Shows a field of pack-ice forming.

To me the magic of this frozen moment
Lies and lives in the layout
Of this hyper-natural jigsaw:
Billions of bits and pieces of blue-white ice
All growing,
All changing,
Reshaping
And moving to the muses
Of the cold currents and freezing forces
That dominate this bleak but beautiful Arctic domain.

Are there bored deities looking down from the skies above
Or their immortal cousins of the deeps staring up
Possessed of the power
And depressed enough in eternity
To want to puzzle this puzzle out
And fit the fragments together
With no box-lid template to go on,
‘Til there is nothing
But a seamless, uniform nothingness,
Stretching endlessly north,
Sealing the sea for six months or more
Beneath a solid shell of itself?

No?
Then maybe it is just Mother Nature
Playing with herself.

Whatever it was, is, or will be
It will forever be a photo that affected me.