The summer sky is just a bowl
Of old blue china:
The horizon hills serrate the rim,
And the tops of the tallest trees
Etch patterns round the sides.
Sometimes I think those great air-planes
Will fly too high
And cut a jagged hole.
Then the Philistines will sell in their stores
Souvenirs
Made of the glittering shards that fall.
~H.W. Stewart, ‘Sky’ (1920)
photo: a single frame from what was hundreds taken during the evening hours from the swim step aboard m/v Saoirse (‘sear-sha’) while watching what seemed to be a sun that refused to move at all on this the longest day of the year in 2019. The goal was a timelapse of sorts but here and now – many years later and today – on these shortest days of our dark Alaska December, counting down to the winter solstice and eating what seems like enough calories every day to sustain a couple of bears – just looking at this makes my eyeballs hurt.