Ice field. I am the slow accrual of snow. I have turned millennia of fluffy precipitation into the densest, bluest, glassiest, ice-weight. At my heart I begin to creak and rip. I feel my children impatient in me, desperate to flow as they are born to. I am the greatest weight, but they have the heft.
The summer is beginning to register, the year has shape again and my eager bairns are ready to break away from me and tear me asunder. They will overtake me as I fade away. I will give up my body to make up theirs.
Glaciers.
Now in my heart I feel the rumblings, the cracking, the slipping. They will leave the ground beneath nostalgic for the static years I have given them, encased in my great body. Now - I warn the earth, it must be ready for ripping.
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Glacier, I stretch out into the landscape. I am hungry to roll onwards. I am eating rocks and animals that dare to die on my surface. I want to move. I am continuing to move.
No obstacle. I roll onwards. I hear the aching moans of the ground that I rip up and move, but I cannot feel for it, because this is all I can do. It is all I want to do, to surge onwards - it is not disdain, I am ice, just fact.
There are those that would say they have shaped the landscape. I have met arrogant forces that stroll my surface as if it were their own work. Whose memories do not extend through half my life.
I watch them quietly as they claim agency over my actions. They plant trees, they give deer golden hue and supernatural strength. They whisper stories to young hunters who pick their way through forests. These humans - fur clad - they fall for the parlour tricks of these hoodoo peddlars. Even as they bear witness to my impossible strength. They listen to those that would claim to shape the landscape.
O! I am glacier. Glacial - and impossible. Yet these fiddly gods, these undying weaklings imagine themselves a role far beyond themselves. I am glacier. I am tearing through this wet ground with no concern. No obstruction.
Listen to me, if you could. I cry in wrenching cracks - I scream in retching ravines as I begin to die off. I am calling out to those men that wear pelts and eat muscles, to tell them that I am strong and I am mighty. I am righteous in my arrogance. No raconteur I. I am glacier.
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Lake District, I am landscape. I am the descendant of ice field and glacier. And volcano and sediment before that. I have inherited all the pride and stature of my ancestors. I am still but I am not placid.
Great frowning ridges. I rise up around fertile valleys. Arrogant in my inaccessibility. You optimistically name high valleys - passes, as if you could traverse them with ease. I am rock ripped and shredded into one deep giving ‘U’ after another.
I am still but in abandoned boulders and comely mounds of detritus I recall aeons of movement. I am meaningless to anyone except myself and my ancestors. Yet there are those that would seek significance in my majesty. That instill wonder in a ‘vista’ a viewpoint that depends on an observer.
I feel no gratitude. Not even my callous forebears warm my rock-heart. I have nothing to offer you - yet they come, and they take so much from the landscape you call dramatic - which is sheer fact alone.
I am rock and horror. I am height and anger, and you scale me like you deserve it. You see in me such ethereal wonder. How can you find such wishy washy romance in a landscape that was churned through? Valleys and lakes there are record of violent, unyielding selfishness.
In corners and caves I have known ‘gods’ to reveal themselves to farmers and sheep-herds. I have known them to conceal methods in howling winds that I am channeling. Yet - with their feeble memories - they imagine this to be their doing. And these tricksters have astounded the parasite people that live off of my slopes. They have brought in the poets, and the tourists have followed. Now among them there are those that claim my landscape as their domain. It is not and won’t be.
I am height and I am anger. I am deep lake and shivering cold. I am wind that rushes. And there is no wonder to be beheld here. It just seems like it. In my stillness I cannot crush those tea leaf ‘gods’ and their huckster holy men.