Requiem for a Glacier Hollow

“Requiem for a Glacier Hollow” was written for World Day for Glaciers 2025, an international event introduced as part of the United Nations International Year for Glaciers’ Preservation. The poem is accompanied by M E L T, a soundscape presenting sounds collected in ice caves under the Morteratsch Glacier during the 2023 summer ice melt.

Requiem for a Glacier Hollow – Leonard Maassen

Approaching, tumultuous stone rests
Scattered before the gorging weight.
Sculpted by beating suns and grinding rock beneath,
The mouth of a whale, open and hungered draws me in.

My cold fingers caress the soft undulations of this feverish ice,
And the murmurs of a giant
Archive and manifest memory of shared winters past
Surge through my nervous system.

Blueish play of shadow,
My inner being is attracted by the risk and tragedy of it all.
Suspension and collapse, potential held against gravity.
A momentous inertia tumbling down the mountainside,
Gaining momentum, energy,
Heat.

Last winter, the ice crashed far down the jagged slopes.
Cascading liquefied stone and soil
Roared into the valley below
Cracking the banks of the trusty village river
Now overflowed
And pushing up from underneath the floorboards
Of our comfortably furnished living room.

Awe mingled with gratitude and immensity
My confidence has grown strong
Woven between the tentacles of anthropic surveillance.
A helicopter-team will endeavour to find me
If my fool’s errand into the ice goes awry.

Yet in this cave, thoughts become distant –
Echoes adorning the brahman hum.
Mesmerized ever closer to the ice’s surface,
Its intricate cracks and squeaks and bubbles
Its hard, gently sloped surface
Its water flowing transparently beneath
My sturdy hiking boots angulate on the unforgiving ice,
But held I am nonetheless.


Downstream of the mountain
In a sheet of solid water
I feel myself, breathing here,
Clouds of misty breath
Unfurling in the frozen air
Embodying a passing trace of my attachment to this place,
Sanctuary and shrine amongst the endless –
Pouring snow and grey-white gusts of buffeting wind
In the valley.


The afternoon grows warmer
And I sense I must return to my nearer family.
Soon, this other sibling will pass
And the frigid substance,
Boundary of this safe space
Will ebb into the mounded earth
Soaking gently into soil and rounded pebbles
To quietly subside
And leave,
Empty, fluid.
Flowing hollow.

M E L T presents field recordings taken 30 metres deep inside the Morteratsch Glacier (CH) during the 2023 summer ice melt as part of the Heart of a Glacier project.

Attuning to the textures of this melting space allows for a moment of reflection in the midst of rapidly transforming planetary climatic envelopes.

It can be difficult to find a language that adequately expresses the experience of living amidst the environmental turmoil of the 21st century. Alongside communicating the immediate and crass physical predicaments of land and bodies caught in the midst of the new ecology, this language attempts to encompass complex amalgams of fear, love, grief, resentment, guilt and nostalgia all at once.

How do we make sense of our emotional responses to changes that are often difficult to describe verbally in the first place? Our environment is not changing only in measurable, quantifiable ways. It is changing in creeping, insidious deviations from intuitively learnt and embodied histories. As such, our knowledge of the environments we inhabit is as much harboured in observations aspiring to objectivity as it is in the affective realm of our subtle bodily experiences.

The techniques and instruments of Western empiricism have often struggled, or outright refused, to recognise and foster these sensory knowledge-makings. Through the aesthetics of ambient atmosphere, Heart of a Glacier invites us to make room for our bodily reasoning. To attune to the viscerality of 21st century environmental change through dreams and drifting consciousness.

I created Heart of a Glacier with a sense of longing. A longing for a post-human integration of legal-scientific vocabularies with ancient bodily knowledges. As the artist Kyriaki Goni puts it, to develop techno-shamanic networks of resilience and care.

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