Isabella Mead

In place

We are nurturing an ice princess. She sleeps
with six other blastocysts resting on ice,
and, while we wait, believing they will stay

in place, we encase ourselves in mist
away in Svalbard, sovereignty of white
marbling with swirls of earth and rock,

and we tread the snow across the tundra,
the frozen fjord and icy river
towards the moonscape of the moraine

where mountains give over to glacier.
The ice is still. It waits. It stays
in place. Even through the long

drawn-out days of midnight sun;
we block the light, draw blackout blinds,
don sleeping masks, play soothing music,

believe that if an hour goes by, or seven,
we’ll wake to find the landscape changeless,
the sunlight just where we left it.

wires

Hiking the slopes of Spitzbergen
alongside a trail of radio masts,
once the only source of communication
with the mainland, I hear her pleading
for her own phone; even now,
before she is born. No other sound
across the white mountain. I’ll oblige,
as long as she calls me from time to time
so I might tell her about the saxifrage
that starts to grow before the snow has gone.

Now the drifts are thick, the wires are slack,
and the masts, lost in the lull of ascent,
list and list, one by one, until the last
lies prone on the ground, like driftwood on ice
straying seaward; the cables severed
and splayed, a dried bouquet
half-buried in snow. And she is calling
now, before sleep, and I can’t listen in
across this distance, only watch a light wind
tease the wires all the way to the peak.

Isabella Mead was Poet-in-Residence in April 2024 at Spitzbergen Artists Centre in Svalbard, where these poems were written. She is the Artistic Director and Joint CEO of Poetry School, and a Trustee of Jane Austen’s House. She is also studying a part-time degree in French and Spanish. Her debut pamphlet, ‘Dear Rwanda’, was published with Live Canon in 2023. Her work has appeared in Magma, Mslexia, The Telegraph, Ink Sweat & Tears, Poetry News and Anacapa Review.

Isabella wrote the following about her poems:

I wrote these poems during my residency at Spitzbergen Artists Centre in Svalbard. A week before, I had had embryos cryopreserved, and the thought of this was with me constantly as I hiked in the Arctic. The poems try to render the parallels between the precarious futures of both my blastocysts in cold storage, and the sea ice on which so much life is dependent.  ‘In Place’ and ‘Wires’ aimed to capture the complex feelings of hope in the face of fleeting odds. I used the white space to island the stanzas, to reflect a sense of desolation and uncertainty.