At imaginary garden with real toads, today, we are presented with the quote below and issued the challenge of selecting up to 13 words from it to use in a poem of our own which involves metaphor.

I am taking every 13th word from the Setterfield passage to use as the first words of each line of my poem, in which, arguably, sled and sleigh metaphorically represent technology, and the river may be divine providence, may be the bounty of greater nature, may be the course of a human lifespan.

“People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.” ~ Diane Setterfield

their sleds were not sleighs but

this mattered little

to them, for they had never known such luxury as

we have;

the Inuit knew

comfort

though, in their furs, flying along a path forged for them by the

ice of the Yukon River as if

by

magic