No more the picturebook Eskimo, <br />the modern Inuit have central heating, <br />snowmobiles, welfare; they do not need <br />to fashion harpoons from bone, wait all day <br />for seal to come to ice hole, drag the body <br />to a home they have built from snow. <br /> <br />Once they lived with cold <br />and the creatures of the cold, <br />fish, seal, and white bear, familiar <br />if not friends, the snow itself <br />almost alive in its moods and movements, <br />falling as flakes, powder, clumps, <br />floating, flying, dazzling, stinging, <br />covering, drifting, compacting to ice. <br />Snow informed their lives; <br />one word was not enough. <br /> <br />Our life from infancy to grave <br />is shaped by love, comforting, calming, <br />thrilling, unsettling, dazzling, stinging, <br />covering, drifting, compacting to.... <br /> <br />Seventeen words for snow, <br />How many ways to say I love you?<br /><br />Paul Hansford<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/seventeen-words/
