Escapril 2024, Day 1: "Change of State"
A poem about the melting permafrost and the consequences.
We betrayed whoever named it permafrost,
The one cold shoulder we could lean on.
Grounds, ancient and once loyal, wept
And the oceans got merrily drunk on its tears
Then swallowed up the lands in its stupor.
Poisons, pernicious and preserved for centuries,
Proudly turned from water and became air,
Blackening the skies with miasmic clouds.
Yesterday, I spontaneously decided to give the Escapril challenge a go this year. I hadn't expected to, I'm terrible at keeping to commitments. But I figured a challenge might be the creative push I need to write more.
Day one's prompt, "change of state", made me think of the periodic table at first. Perhaps with more time, I could have figured out how to turn that thought into poetry.
Instead, a second thought came to me and wouldn't let go: the changing state of ice to water to vapour. And it reminded me of my flash fiction "Dreaming in Permafrost". This little poem serves as a heavily truncated version of that story.