Dan Lukiv

Rocky Mountain-Holiday, poet Dan Lukiv

Revised Edition: LukivPress (Victoria, BC), 2021.

Previously published as Between the Gums (LukivPress Online [Quesnel, BC], 2008).

An excerpt

Not Under Arktos, the Bear

An ice-tide of breadth,
Shrinking and spreading in earth flow,
Circling a fish drawn up and solid
In five seconds,
And steel dropped, turned to shards.
Brutal beauty, this ice-desert-
Home of the wingless midge
And Aristotelian balance to the
North Bulk.

See the Ross Ice Shelf,
Big as France,
Fed by seven solid floes,
Puking ice berg cities
Of blue mammoth
For chinstrap penguins
To jabber on.

James Cook awed and repelled and attracted
By windswept blue
Ice-islands
Sloshed and dunked by tyrannosaurus teeth
Of sea-salt and whirl.

Send the gold-rush skins of blood-bare
Seals to China and Europe and other closets.
Step on mainland moss that can't hide
One print for one decade.
Dig a great heal into this humpbackless,
Ozoneless antipode.

This ice-fist freezes
What it can.

The author

Dan Lukiv is a poet, novelist, columnist, short story and article writer, and independent education researcher (hermeneutic phenomenology). His creative writing has appeared in 19 countries. Recently, he has been experimenting with temporal shifts and narrative strings in his haiku and senryu.