I posted this poem on my Facebook page and someone said it was a ‘gut punch’ of a poem which made my day. It’s from my forthcoming collection (which has been forthcoming for far too long) that’s themed on the Icelandic winter.
Typically, I’m not one for writing about the gleeful times…so most of the poems in the collection look at winter through a pitchy lens, including this one, which will, I think, be the book’s opening poem.
I’ve never struggled with a book of poems as much as I’ve struggled with this one, and I’m pretty desperate to finish it. My ADHD can only give so much time to a project before I want to begin something else, and I’ve already been working on this book much longer than I’d anticipated.
Many of the struggles I’ve experienced stem from self-doubt and my tendency to overthink every poem to within an inch of its life. But those subjects can be explored in a different post. For now, here’s a bleak, ‘punch in the gut’ poem that’ll hopefully, if I’ve done my work well enough, leave you feeling grateful you weren’t alive during the settlement of Iceland…which was initially called Snæland, if you’re wondering about the title.
Starving To Death In Snæland
The storeroom key hangs heavy as Þór’s hammer
on my belt. Where it twats my thigh, stormy welts swell.
My boy, unsteady on his feet, fumbles for the key.
Ordinarily, nobody touches it but me.
But the storeroom is stripped. There’s nothing left to protect.
I pass the key over; he rubs his puffy gums with it.
***
My children may die before me, yet,
all I can think of are the fatty testicles of a ram,
berry-sweetened skyr, shit-smoked lamb.
Their faces are prematurely haggard,
teeth and eyes horrifically oversized.
They tip back frost fair heads, squint at the rafters,
in the hope a wafting piece of white fish has been missed.
***
In the baðstofa, nobody stirs but to stoke the fire,
to piss and shit. Every bit of gritty lichen growing
on the hearth has been picked away and eaten.
I can barely recall the fishy stink of whale oil,
nor the faecal hum of my parents corpses
that rested during a week-long storm
inside these cursed sod walls.
Amma wouldn’t mind, my eldest had said,
petting my mamma’s cold arm.
Does he know others have eaten their own?
That we are said to taste like pork?
When we first arrived, birch forests
commanded the land from the interior to the sea.
Those forests swiftly gathered as timber about our knees,
but how slow, how slow they were to re-grow.
Snæland has never been and will never be like home.
I’m certain we offended the landvættir
when we kept the dragon head on our ship’s prow.
Though the sea passage itself was child’s play
compared to these harrowed, hollow days.
The summertime of toil flew fast as the swift.
A snarling sun stalked and roasted us like pigs.
Our scorched skin crackled and split.
We sweated to outlast this season of paralysis.
But our labour wasn’t enough to see us
walk back through winter’s black mouth.
***
I gather the will to work the loom,
prop my eyes open with waking sticks.
What is it that I’m afraid I’ll miss?
Scuffing at their lice bites, the children
shuffle sheep bones on the dirt-packed floor.
Husband sharpens his sigðir on a whetstone
like he’ll use it again soon. Twice he slices himself.
His palm buds blood. Cattish, he laps it up.
In the bed closet, husband says
shall I turn towards you? I tell him no.
I unsnarl my children’s hair as we sit dying
in the light of our last candle.
What will be said about us in time to come?
They should have gone home is what will be said.
They should have gone home.
Skyr – A dish made of sheep milk. Its consistency is similar to strained yogurt.
Landvættir – Land spirits.
Baðstofa – A communal room where families lived out their days when not out on the land or at sea.
Sigðir – Sickle.
A Wyrd Of Her Own 