After I Came Back from Iceland
by Sheenagh Pugh
published in Poetry For the Earth, edited by Sara Dunn with Alan Scholefield, Fawcett Columbine, 1991
After I came back from Iceland,
I couldn’t stop talking. It was the light,
you see, the light and the air. I tried to put it
into poems, even, but you couldn’t write
the waterfall on White River, blinding
and glacial, nor the clean toy town
with the resplendent harbour for its glass.
You couldn’t write how the black lava shone,
nor how the outlines of the bright red roofs
cut the sky sharp as a knife; how breathing
was like drinking cold water. When I got back
to Heathrow and walked out into Reading,
I damn near choked on this warm gritty stuff
I called air; also on the conjecture
that we’d all settle for second best
once we’d forgotten there was something more.
Rock Hvitsevkur, Iceland
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