Bolivia's big chill: saltscapes and glaciers

Isla de Pescadores, covered with giant cacti, this outcrop floats surreally on the salt flats

Zhila Mosa’ed

Shame

Unfamiliar with the blue of the sky,
Unfamiliar with the shining green
of the earth,
Unfamiliar with the history
of man’s covering his body,
I am standing
Inside a circle of ice,
Surrounded by sorrow and anxiety;
And naked, ancient and alone,
I carry on my shoulders
the thousand-year-old burden
of shame,
of coveredness,
of modesty.
O mothers of sleep
Whose bones
Are the ancient hiding place
of the dead instincts,
Look how my bare, ancient roots,
Slowly but with resolution,
Penetrate the ice.

Zhila Mosa’ed was born in Tehran in 1948, and currently lives in Sweden. ‘Shame’ was taken from the book of Modern Persian Poetry by Mahmud Kianush.

Lake of ice

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (extract)

And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o’ertaking wings,
And chased south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken —
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), English lyrical poet, critic, and philosopher.

The salt lake with its indeterminable distances

The world’s largest salt flat covers and area of 12,000 sq km and is 3653m high.

It was part of a historic lake, Lago Minchin, which covered most of Southwest Bolivia and is now all but dried out; left are a few small lakes and the vast salt pan known as Salar de Uyuni.

The salt piled high ready for collection

The salt is unloaded before being dried, bagged and sold

Jaime Saenz

Watching the River Flow (for Leonardo Garcia Pabon)

When the hour comes I’ll speak with you, watching the river flow, at the river’s edge.
With the profile of your face, with the echo of your voice, parceling out my voice into the depths,
into the great spaces that death’s eye has seen, you will know the hidden word.
Where the wind stills. Where living is finished off and all color is one.
Where water is not touched and where earth is not touched: inside my invisible presence, where you know yourself to be, in the millenary present
– of deeds, of smells and of forms; of animals, of minerals, of plants inside time.
In time, of time. Inside premonition’s root. Inside the seed, inside anguish,
only you will know the hidden word.
The aloneness of the world. The aloneness of man. Man’s reason for being and the world’s
- the circular solitude of the sphere. Increment and decline;
the closing of the hermetic thing. The hermetic closing of the thing.
The immense, the immeasurable – the incommensurate grave, indivisible and blank.

Taken from Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (2002), translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander. Jaime Saenz (1921-1986) is Bolivia’s leading writer of the 20th century, publishing eleven books of poetry between 1955 and 1984.

A flamingo taking off, Laguna canapa, Near Salar de Uyuni, Southwest Bolivia

Elizabeth Bishop

The Imaginary Iceberg

We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel.
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
and all the sea were moving marble.
We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship;
we’d rather own this breathing plain of snow
though the ship’s sails were laid upon the sea
as the snow lies undissolved upon the water.
O solemn, floating field,
are you aware an iceberg takes repose
with you, and when it wakes may pasture on your snows?

This is a scene a sailor’d give his eyes for.
The ship’s ignored. The iceberg rises
and sinks again; its glassy pinnacles
correct elliptics in the sky.
This is a scene where he who treads the boards
is artlessly rhetorical. The curtain
is light enough to rise on finest ropes
that airy twists of snow provide.
The wits of these white peaks
spar with the sun. Its weight the iceberg dares
upon a shifting stage and stands and stares.

The iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
it saves itself perpetually and adorns
only itself, perhaps the snows
which so surprise us lying on the sea.
Good-bye, we say, good-bye, the ship steers off
where waves give in to one another’s waves
and clouds run in a warmer sky.
Icebergs behoove the soul
(both being self-made from elements least visible)
to see them so: fleshed, fair, erected indivisible.

This poem appears in North & South, Elizabeth Bishop’s first collection of poetry, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955.

Glacier

Emily Dickinson

Reverse cannot befall

Reverse cannot befall
That fine Prosperity
Whose Sources are interior –
As soon – Adversity

A Diamond – overtake
In far – Bolivian Ground –
Misfortune hath no implement
Could mar it – if it found –

Emily Dickinson was one of the most innovative poets of 19th century America. She wrote over 1700 poems, which were discovered after her death and published posthumously.

Hotel Playa Blanca, built entirely from salt, right down to the beds, chairs and tables

Walt Whitman

Salut Au Monde (extract)

I see the Brazilian vaquero;
I see the Bolivian ascending Mount Sorata;
I see the Wacho crossing the plains – I see the incomparable rider of
horses with his lasso on his arm;
I see over the pampas the pursuit of wild cattle for their hides.

I see little and large sea-dots, some inhabited, some uninhabited;
I see two boats with nets, lying off the shore of Paumanok, quite still;
I see ten fishermen waiting – they discover now a thick school of
mossbonkers – they drop the join’d seine-ends in the water,
The boats separate – they diverge and row off, each on its rounding
course to the beach, enclosing the mossbonkers;
The net is drawn in by a windlass by those who stop ashore,
Some of the fishermen lounge in their boats – others stand negligently
ankle-deep in the water, pois’d on strong legs;
The boats are partly drawn up – the water slaps against them;
On the sand, in heaps and winrows, well out from the water, lie the
green-back’d spotted mossbonkers. I see the regions of snow and ice;
I see the sharp-eyed Samoiede and the Finn;
I see the seal-seeker in his boat, poising his lance;
I see the Siberian on his slight-built sledge, drawn by dogs;
I see the porpoise-hunters – I see the whale-crews of the South
Pacific and the North Atlantic;
I see the cliffs, glaciers, torrents, valleys, of Switzerland – I mark
the long winters, and the isolation.