tiel aisha ansari: Sufi warrior poet

This year, we braved wildfires, hurricanes, and floods to bring you the best environmental short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers today as part of our climate change contest (which you can access here).

I interviewed Second Place winner and poet Tiel Aisha Ansari about her poem “Antarctic Glaciers are Like Old Men.” You can read Tiel’s poem here below and here.

Sufi warrior poet Tiel Aisha Ansari has been featured by Measure, Windfall, and Everyman’s Library. Her collections include Knocking from Inside, High-Voltage Lines, Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare’s Stable, The Day of My First Driving Lesson, and Dervish Lions. She hosts Wider Window Poetry on KBOO Community Radio.

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“Antarctic Glaciers are Like Old Men”

lying on the coast like old white men in beach chairs, arms behind their heads, heels dug into the sand to keep from sliding. Only now the water is rising, lifts them so their feet no longer touch bottom, like yours when you were small and tried to sit in grownup chairs. Now they’re like old men in a swimming pool, floating with elbows hooked over the edge. They sweat, fevered. Their limbs crevasse and calve. They stare up into the relentless sky, a little puzzled, a little worried perhaps: how did I get like this?

Once I bowed at the foot of the Athabaska glacier because I was awed by the thought of all that time – time is what glaciers are made of, not frozen water. Time falling from the sky in endless accumulation, packing down into layer upon layer upon layer. Time is less substantial even than a snowflake, and yet there it was, a wall of solid time sloping down before me. The old men of Antarctica are drifting, white hair thinning away from their heads. Their flesh –cold white compacted time – gives up its memories. Ice-caves limned in sapphire and emerald, floored with rock scraped from an unseen continent, collapse and melt. Now they’re skeletons, a scatter of giant bones on the face of the water. Ship-killer knucklebones, a metacarpal the size of Manhattan, vertebrae made of dissolving time. This extinction will leave no fossils.

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Caylee Weintraub: What was the inspiration behind the piece you submitted to our climate change contest?

Tiel Aisha Ansari: I read that Antarctic glaciers are being melted not only from above, which we knew, but from underneath as warm ocean water infiltrates between the ocean floor and the underside of the glacier, which normally digs into the seafloor and forms a barrier to water. This led to the image of the glacier digging its heels into the ocean floor, as a person might dig their heels to keep from sliding. The rest followed.

I am not a poet; I am a scribe of Allah.

CW: Who are some authors you admire? What works of theirs do you draw from in your own writing process?

TAA: I admire a lot of authors and try to draw on whatever I admire in them. I don’t have particular works that I look to, it’s more a matter of developing a broad library of techniques.

CW: Are you often drawn to environmental themes? If so, why? If not, what other themes are you drawn to in your writing?

TAA: Enviromental themes are very common in my writing. For the past two to three years, I’ve been writing a lot of poems specifically to address climate change. I’ve assembled a manuscript out of this self-challenge that I’m seeking a publisher for. I also commonly write about racism and social justice, which I see increasingly becoming entwined with the climate crisis.

I also commonly write about racism and social justice, which I see increasingly becoming entwined with the climate crisis.

CW: What can writing do to help prevent climate change and other environmental issues? Is there a particular piece of environmental writing that showed you the power of writing for the environment?

TAA: I think Loren Eiseley’s short piece “The Star Thrower” is probably the single most powerful piece I can remember reading. I believe any piece of art that sparks a person’s interest in the natural world – a care, a curiosity, a wondering – makes that person less likely to act with thoughtless destructiveness.

I believe any piece of art that sparks a person’s interest in the natural world – a care, a curiosity, a wondering – makes that person less likely to act with thoughtless destructiveness.