Glacier
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I woke one morning this winter after a sudden heavy snowfall to see the evergreens in front of my house bent in half under a burden of snow and ice. Unless I freed them, they would snap under their own weight, so I took a shovel and started bashing the branches to shake the snow down. Suddenly one of the heaviest branches let fly, and snow burned my face like sunlight, iced and clung and kept on pouring as I stood, chin tilted toward the dam-burst, pillar-calm, with my every sense alert. But what a puzzle for the neighbor boy, jarred from his play by that basso whump!, to see a madwoman gripped by her own storm. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him wrinkle his face, then ravel his sled-tow and tramp away. For me, time did a lazy soft-shoe; long minutes seemed to pass, and I thought of mammoths, goose down, Ice-Age cunning, the long white drawl of a glacier on the move, snow avalanching down a polar chasm. For him, the same moment fled like a gnat.
―Diane Ackerman
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Poem: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier