Poems from the Polar Circles

By Ronnie J. Smith

As I confronted the many faces of the Arctic and Antarctic, spanning that diversity sometimes in a matter of minutes, I often felt thrust into breathtaking polar panorama. My experience has led me to its natural and sleeping beauty; its challenging flight that no one completely masters; its frigid shrew of the sea with its ability to resist and repel any vessel; its incredible animal kingdom which needs the extremity of the polar region for sanctuary; the love, trials of the heart, humor, and loneliness ever-present that inspire and pervade the human condition; and the courageous people who have claimed their destiny exploring an amazing wilderness.
The last pure place on earth is under pressure from a civilization that doesn’t understand its fragility, its beauty, and is so removed that the same civilization will never know what was lost once it’s gone. My experience and work at both Poles was a gift to me. It was grueling effort at times, but gave my life rhapsody when understood in a planetary context. The hope is to raise an awareness for those who have never seen, and likely will never have the opportunity to see, the chaste beauty choreographing what only appears as a limitless polar domain; a domain vulnerable and rare.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronnie J. Smith
• Release date: Aug 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465924827

Ronnie J. Smith

Ronnie J. Smith was born of U.S. Air Force parents in Udine, Italy, and grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. He attended Loyola College (B.A.) and the University of Maryland. Ron played semi-pro basketball in Europe before entering the U.S. Air Force in 1983 to fly C-130 aircraft. He has traveled the world as a professional aviator, bringing a spiritual dimension to his writing through this inspiration. After many years flying in the polar regions, he was selected to be the in-theater commander of Operation DEEP FREEZE, the DoD logistics support to the U.S. Antarctic Program from 2005-2008. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times, The Wisconsin Review, and The Evansville Review, among others. He resides in St. Louis, Missouri.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

All words from the heart

wombed in creation

before forever,

and to clover

that offspring eternal

with fragrant earth;

comb incense

from cosmos for a

million emanations of love;

to bear True Reason,

to evince one bold life

that animates purity;

would dare to cry,

mute as a butterfly,

the brilliant essence of spirit.

INTRODUCTION

This book of poetry started out as a sensory stream of images; different ideas that developed through years of working up north and down south. The sensual and surreal stimuli of the polar regions create what are ungraspable impressions in many ways. The caustic reality of weather, frigid waters, icy terrain and tundra combine to preserve it. This combination shakes one to the core physically; scrubbing the senses mentally. A visit to the interior of the unspoiled polar regions to personally interact with its purity and meandering grandeur can alter one’s framework of our planet. To describe this is challenging, and a genuflection to a higher order; a spiritual quiver to a greater spirituality of an eternity