Poetry
Sounds of Silence
The team thaws out another iceman
In the deep mountains of Tyrol.
This time their full mummy-kit
Ensures tissue preservation,
And a 3D extrusion of his vocal tract
Wired into their prototype sound tech
Reveals a distinct corpse voice.
But not from the distant past, no.
Instead their leader hears her mother.
The archivist his twin sister in Gaelic.
Their tracker her soldier godson.
All saying, “So cold cold cold.”
The team anticipates the playback
But the file is blank.
—Robert Frazier
Of the over 140 poems Robert Frazier has published in Asimov’s Science Fiction since 1979, many populate his ten poetry collections including Life During the Lazarus Age, Space Cowboy Books 2025. He has won the Asimov’s Readers Poll twice—in 1990 and 2015. Poems have been reprinted in The Heartbeat of the Universe, Interstellar Flight Press 2024, the Nebula Awards Anthology, Year’s Best Science Fiction Annual, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror Annual, and elsewhere. Frazier is an oil painter by profession on the island of Nantucket.