The Trekker

The trekker resumed his plodding.
He would never realize fully
why he'd stopped short in the middle
of the Arctic glare. The Kola Peninsula
was no place to pause, even transiently,
and besides, he had miles to go before dark fell.
There would be no divine hand
reaching down to turn him back,
to gaze further at the blank canvas
he had been compelled moments earlier
to scour. So he would never find
the massive, exotic bloodstone
which had been tossed about
the Murmansk Oblast snowdrifts
like seaglass upon a heaving ocean
for centuries. An ancestor had lost it
when he lost his life to snow blindness.
It had temporarily surfaced just long enough
for the simple man's eyes to notice a dim spot
in the snow, before being buried again.
The man shook his head and carried on.
That was the closest the stone
would ever come to rescue
and the closest our traveler
would ever come to wealth.
The stone would sweep north with the winds
slowly, over the infinite millennia
and the man would starve that winter.






* Written for the "three word inspiration thread" with the requirement that I use "kola," "trekker" and "bloodstone" in a poem. *