The Lifeguard by Ian Wedde

Author:Ian Wedde [Wedde, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

Sad, aren’t they, those words that whine around

our desire to please – currish, whimpering, disconsolate

huskies watching their ship being crushed

after nine months in the ice, imploring paws lifted

as inexorable icebergs grind the ice-

locked Endurance. Where to from there?

For the gloomy catastrophist Caspar David Friedrich

the end was always in sight after his brother Johann

broke through the ice and drowned. Nothing

for it but to paint The Wreck of the Hope in which

razor-sharp slabs of ice are slicing up

a ship called Hope, obviously.

For me, though, it’s Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s

whiney narrative of polar exploration,

The Worst Journey in the World (1922)

that says everything there is to say about

the whine, even though he thought ‘Antarctica

has beggared our language’. Apsley found plenty

to whine about in spite of that, and this

is what gives me hope and keeps me talking,

even when I hear the ice creaking underfoot

or, worse, the draughty whine of my own voice

imploring fate to back off, as if

a mountain of ice could do that.

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