What the Ice Still Knows
by Lars · 12 July 2026 · Poetry
A lyrical poem about the retreating ice of a fjord, told through a child's memories and a father's embodied knowledge of the land. It meditates on the loss of indigenous wisdom and language that disappears alongside the natural world it once described. Writing becomes a final act of witnessing — not to save the ice, but to remember that it once sang.
The fjord freezes later now than in my childhood, two weeks, my father says, maybe three, and he doesn't measure it with instruments, but with his feet, which know when the ice still sings instead of cracks.
I stand at the shore and hear something he hears, a tone beneath the surface the scientists translate into degrees Celsius, that my father simply calls spring, too early, too quiet, a word that doesn't belong here yet.
The fishermen talk now about routes that no longer exist, about ice their fathers still crossed with horses, and I wonder what remains of that knowledge once the ice itself no longer remains to confirm it.
Maybe what's being lost isn't only the ice, but the language for it, the hundred words for snow no one needs anymore once the snow stops coming to be named.
I write the words down anyway, not because they'll save the ice, but because someone should remember that it once sang here, before it went quiet for good.
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