Swimming in Antarctica | Ciarán Parkes

How she accepts it. How she enters willingly
into the cold. How her skin, almost immediately,
becomes cold as the water is, her body’s heat

pushed deep down under, to protect
her internal organs, that flush with blood, that float
like fish in some warm Mesozoic ocean

as her heartbeat thunders round them, as they move,
just for now, companionable, together.
She sees penguins on the dipping, rising shore

and people bundled up who look like penguins,
black against the snow. Her back up team
lean from their inflatables as she threshes water

up like bed sheets, speeding, swimming faster
than she ever swam before, to generate
more warmth, to stay alive, then something

shifting inside her as she starts to swim
straight out to sea, moving so fast they
can do nothing now but watch her slip away.

(First published in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily)