Her glassy muzzle beats back the salt squall to be here.
She who in her time swallowed seal cub after seal cub,
sets out from Iqaluit, sprints the Arctic platform
from leeward ridge to longing, dividing sea from tundra.
When pack-ice grows too thin, fishermen catch her
like a ghost in the trawl. She rakes the beaten threshold
of their stern, her mouth open, sniffing the scent of human
which is also the scent of loss, all coppery across her tongue.
It is her or them on the open water. They push her with shovels
into the boat’s wake where she floats for a time, a waning moon
pale above the slate black deep.
Carol Hobbs’s collection New-found-land, available through Main Street Rag Press, explores the beauty and risk of that island. Her poems delve into emigration and life as an outsider longing for home and a native returning. In manuscript form, this book was the winner of a New England PEN Discovery Prize. Hobbs’s recent poems look to what remains in the wake of climate crisis and global pandemic. She teaches English and creative writing in Hudson, Massachusetts. Her work appears in many publications including The Antigonish Review, Appalachian Heritage, Cider Press Review, The Fiddlehead, Lily Poetry Review, The Malahat Review, and Pendemics.
