“Others abide our question," but there is no abiding here in this van of eager explorers. At the start of the age Victoria rules in dowdy splendor and there's much to be done, adventure brought up to date and both poles beckon, north and south, for eons frozen to a fare-thee-well and remote it seems and cold as the moon. Do you remember Admiral Peary? So bold to the cold North Pole? A so-so story of success, it turns out, shaky on its legs and in its transits, shaky as the tired dogs pulling the sleds. Peary, bundled nose-high, laying his lines to ultimate north; maybe and maybe not. Peary, a slack navigator, Henson, who was black and not slack, a crack navigator and translator scouted ahead alone, a black man in all that white left his footprints and most likely first to the pole; he never got his due. In any event, Peary and crew posed stiff with flags and Henson forgotten in the glory that followed. Scott, another chosen priest of discovery, Royal Navy, but no planner; counting the nuts and bolts, the ponies and motors to plan was not his way and he paid the price, descending south to his doom. Made it to the pole to find Amundsen's flag and later, forlorn, his tent and a letter to King Haakon; "kindly forward this letter, Captain Scott, if you please." An ungenerous unnecessary kick in the pants. Yes, bow your brow, Scott, good British buckram, to the will of Providence and do your best to the last and that's what Gran found; another tent and three dead men, Scott "half out of his bagg" went out of life hard but now found, a jaundiced pellucid cadaver long past struggle in a desolate canvas tent. There they lie, dead as mackerel. Parchments indecipherable, boxes, debris, bodies, a diary, in a tent bleached with cold drowning in snow and sunlight, yes, the lovely sun shining even over this place of death. How do these explorers carry on? Where stems this grim tenacious resolve? This stiff-lipped courage? To be the first to the poles for no good reason to these meaningless nulls, these nips and peaks of latitude and longitude? Long ago, these explorers, ready for the catch basins of disaster, thumped off in their clunky thick ships to the far north or south farther and farther, hulls pargeted with ice and frogged with frost, got stuck in the relentless grip of the frozen sea one time or another every which way crushed by the cold, abandoned the ships, trudged forward to doom or fame struggled back or didn't, careless about the path home. In time the great white bear goes up on the ice and into the sky; three-starred Orion shines and new legends are born, old dreams raised high to awake and provoke the best and bravest to action. That's the way it is and was for these intrepid souls, ready to die to the last man, to remain frozen corpses in these vast cold rialtos of the two poles, finials of adventure, frozen plaques these heroes, their honor and fame remnants of a bolder nobler age, on its own terms reaching, always reaching for glory.
*****
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. The author has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired.