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Ice Ages
by Sandra Becker
Any moment the Antarctic Ross ice shelf
can calve an iceberg and melt:
New York gone, Florida,
the whole Atlantic coast.
There are things that take ages
of slow melting to dismantle,
each glacial drop sweats
from its rock-hard mountain of ice.
My father died when I was five
but my dammed grief burst suddenly
upon the white-shirted chest of a stranger
when I was twenty-three.
One casual word, evocative melody,
cinematic scene, enough to nudge
wide open the crack in one’s own grave weight.
How many swelling lakes, how large the quake
to wake a dormant tidal wave? How ready
the two-billion tons to burst that which stands fixed
and frozen in one’s dwindling years?
Sandra Becker
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Sandra Becker’s chapbook, Foreign Bodies, was published Spring 2004 by Carolina Wren Press. Other poems
have been published in the Bucks County Writer, Comstock Review, Concrete Wolf, Flesh & Bone,
Freshet, Mad Poets Review, Rexdale Publishing, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts,
Out of Line. She was a runner-up in the 2004 Robert Fraser Poetry Contest and recipient of a writing award
from the National League of American Pen Women/Simi Valley Branch, placing first in their 2000 Poetry Contest for
her poem, “Honor the Stones.”
SANDRA BECKER IN THIS EDITION:
POETRY: Ice Ages
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