Fire and Ice

Two landscapes and the gathering emotions in our current world

Photo by Ona Buflod Bovollen

I awoke to an ice storm.

A glaze like baked sugar on a donut; the texture like that of polished glass. There’s beauty in it, along with danger. Ice both glistens like a diamond and builds barriers—barriers to travel, physical and emotional. Ice encases us, stops us from moving forward, freezes us in time and space.

In some ways, ice can be a metaphor for a period in a life, in a culture. If we stop moving—both personally and as a society or a community—we will eventually melt away. Standing still, stuck, and frozen destroys the ability to grow as a friend, a father, a parent, a partner, a colleague, a citizen, a nation. We should never become so cold as to dismiss our souls. Keep the heart warm so that we can be kind, compassionate, and tolerant. In some aspects, our current world is one of ice. Cold and frostbitten. We are stuck in place, lacking significant movement to grow a better life, a better world. We are in our own ice storm.

I wrote this poem recently about ice and life, about growing old, but also about finding wisdom in the frozen landscape.

Before the storm arrived here in the Midwest, I spent five days in the American Southwest. The Arizona fire to the Midwest ice. The dramatic burning horizon of the desert sunrise and the final hour of light in the sunset are magical, reminding one of the possibilities, of what the day might deliver, what the day has been, and what we have made of it. The fire of life, both for our inner strength and the promises we make to ourselves, and for the dreams of what our culture, our society, our nation can be. Fire, like ice can be destructive. But they are also necessary. We need ice to preserve what’s right. We need fire to fight injustice, the power that corrupts, and to fuel our own passions for family, creativity, and love.

This poem was born from the desert, one about the fire that burns inside all of us, where we might find the kindling to keep it alive, how we can harness the real power it holds.

Ice and fire. Fire and ice. The duality of life’s most powerful forces is undeniable. The great Robert Frost understood this and offered his own artistic take on the extremes of the human emotion—love and hate, hope and loss, ”Fire and Ice”—and how the two will always be intertwined, connected, knotted no matter how hard we try to separate them.

Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” is used in the public domain.

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David W. Berner is the author of several books of award-winning fiction and memoir. His latest, Daylight Saving Time: The power of growing older is available now. His debut poetry collection, Garden Tools is due out in October 2025 from Finishing Line Press. His novella, American Moon will be published by Regal House Publishing in 2026.