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Now is a time for grief to persist, to ring throughout the world.
Marybeth Holleman's poem “How to grieve a glacier,” published in ISLE in 2019, starts by noting the difficulty if not absurdity of the process the title promises to guide the reader through. After all, as a non-human entity, a glacier is an unusual object of affection: “It's not something you can hold in your arms. / You can't rock with its image in a blanket / and keen away the nearing pain” (Holleman, 2019, p. 441). Even so, the speaker insists, “I do love this blue-white giant, / and grieve its leaving,” though she admits that her grief is mingled with excitement at witnessing the sublime spectacle of glacier calving: “I thrill to watch / thunderbolts of ice crash into azure seas” (Holleman, 2019, p. 441). Painfully aware that “it is leaving, abandoning us / to what our kind has created” and that “its gift of rarified water / will only bring more sorrow,” as sea-level rise caused by climate change-induced glacier melt is expected to have dramatic consequences for many coastal areas around the world, she cannot help being struck by the terrible beauty of the unfolding environmental tragedy: “Yet it is a gorgeous deterioration” (Holleman, 2019, p. 442).
Also in 2019, the New Yorker published an article by Lacy Johnson titled “How to mourn a glacier” that addresses the same problem identified by Holleman, albeit in relation to a glacier that is no longer in the process of retreating but that has disappeared altogether. What occasioned the article is the official demise of the Okjökull glacier atop Iceland's Ok volcano, which was marked with a memorial ceremony and the installation of a memorial plaque warning of the impact of climate change at the site of the former glacier in August 2019. Attended by “about a hundred scientists,