Iceberg
Let’s keep capturing the moments
As sharply as we can
So red fields run vibrant
And sparkling with dew
Long after they are dead and dry.
Spread the pixels, widen the aperture!
Let us examine what the lens can save
When the shutter opens and the electrons rush
In a flash, a blink — the instant is past
Etched in eyebrow lines and half-smiles
In front of a mind that might remember the day that
Had to be tamed and captured.
Then it’s gone, these bits of light
While the dogs bark, bite and rush away.
Even an iceberg melts after a thousand years
And the fish locked within
Drift quietly into the depths.
Judge's Commentary
"We jump right into the world of "Iceberg" alongside the speaker upon the invitation set forth in the opening lines: "Let's keep capturing the moments / as sharply as we can." The speaker continues with a self-assured second-person address and an attention to surprising images—yet the poem's greatest strength is the associative leaps made in the first stanza. The last line and in the final, short stanza. The abstract idea of the fleeting nature of time and memory captured—as sharply as with a digital camera—in the image of dogs barking, biting, and then rushing away; the speaker makes the contemplative visceral. And then, across the stanza break, the reader is catapulted into an even more evocative world; across this gap our synapses spark at the jump in scale. We move from the split-second world of digital photography into the millennia of geological time—our minds leap from realm of the mental, to the quotidian, to the glacial. Memory has now become a pre-historic fish drifting "quietly into the depths"—the speaker's confidence and specificity makes the reader a willing believer that this is so."