In entering the waters of Nova Zembla our words froze
so that however we opened our mouths no sound came,
the world stood still as iced-breath before the nose

like solid cloud, like an amorphous frame
for a lost world where echoes of living speech
might still be found, as if all praise or blame

or intimacy or harshness resided there, and each
of us in our enforced silence might contemplate
the mystery, and hope somehow to breach

some inner law of remembrance, however late,
to find what had been said in the very spot
we left it, our histories, our hearts, the precise date

of their breaking, when they were still hot
in our mouths. But there was terror too
and melancholy, because which of us forgot

the dead we had long stowed and carried through
the journey, the beautiful loved dead, the young
with their rifles and explosives, those who

stood on street corners, the quiet unsung
bodies under the rubble of war crushed
by houses that collapsed like a lung

when the air was sucked out of them, the washed
corpses laid out, the old still queuing for bread,
the leaders hanging in the concrete yard, the rushed

verdicts, the prisons... but what can you do with the dead
except store them in silence, in a cloud of breath
that freezes in front of you? Apprehension, dread,

hope and expectation... history is death
remembered in our country. Childhood is this
frozen cloud, this vanished Nazareth

where we began our progress. We feel the kiss
of that dense impenetrable vapour where
the voice is trapped within its icy ellipsis.

We came to Nova Zembla in good faith. The air
was crisp, the trade routes promising, hull and keel
in order, well-stocked with supplies, with rare

spices to offer potential partners in a deal
of our devising: saffron, cypre, our lives
if necessary. But here we are in our seal

of silence, frozen in, husbands, wives
and children, none of us daring to move.
Is it the voice or the cold air in us that survives

Nova Zembla? That still remains to prove.