After I Came Back from Iceland by Sheenagh Pugh

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 th...