She Mountain

Eyjafjallajökull remembers the kind of place she is;
her personality split at the start of time.
The rock just a bed to sleep in for unpredictable spells,
until dreams involving us are done and she turns
with fitful gasps of waking into her revision.
The ice, no longer innocent, becomes a vast machinery.
She thunders as she breaks it and the plates of rock
beneath her, for she is proud and terrible as she ruptures.

She’s a body with a core of hell and lightning,
made up of an old testament she herself invented
in her long and gaseous slumber. Now she flies,
oh how she flies, awesome and most ravishing.
Her mouth pulses ignition red, her lips smoulder black
and the massive white of her risen dress is everywhere.

Susan Taylor