I invite you to traverse the ancient desert;
that southern wintry world, wherein I cut my teeth
on the icescape, scrambling up rocky moraine,
journal and camera in hand.
I sat in the shadow of a glacier;
partitioned the ether in my mind’s eye,
drank up the liquid landscape,
inhaled the burning cold;
carved myself a petite slice of sky,
beset with cosmic jewels.
I waded through the galactic blue;
the lyrical darkness of polar night,
the continental silence: a lullaby,
the stillness of monastic;
seeing beyond the horizon
white jewels all the way down.
I shadow-bathed in the black void
until the arrival of the austral sunrise
dismantled the cobalt architecture of night.
Gazing into the pale machinery of day, our
complements materialize in the blinding white,
some parallel version of ourselves.
My unraveling commenced on the frozen plateau,
eons trapped beneath me. Here lies an archive of
deep time, a timekeeper of geological ages. The past
resonates through this plane, held captive in prehistoric
ice cores, awaiting extraction at the behest of scientists.
I felt ephemeral amid this madness.
The universe spoke in polyphony,
a thousand voices howling in the squall.
These aural delights did please the ear.
I wanted to overwinter and hear them all.
If I could see from all eyes,
the sensory overload would shatter me,
but this loud quiet might repair my soul.
In a paroxysm, I amassed the artifacts of death:
leg and wing bones, pelvises, breastbones, and
two skulls; the sun-bleached remains of Adélie
penguins and limpet shells discarded on beaches.
I deposited my treasures in a makeshift repository,
an artful pile—aiming to bring meaning to bone.
I am the luminary,
my cloak stitched in sunshine,
come to shed light on this matter:
How do we bring art to Antarctica?
Kya Brooks ’25 (kyabrooks@college.harvard.edu) wrote a senior thesis titled “Building the Antarctic Imaginary: Toward a Metaphysical Historicism of Antarctic Art.”