Eskimo Imagining

A cold story poem with some warmth.

Eskimo Imagining

An Arctic fox casts a shadowed glance

Sideways on the frozen glassy lake, slipping

Pigeon like, gingerly, through fractured light

Images of a swollen moon swallows up the night

Wanderlust for blood will keep him tracking

Hunger pain is cryptic in the savage beast

Frigid ice that slices through the birthright

Wild storms bring shivering numbing cold

Pain is cryptic as a scrimshaw man in ivory

Carves out a living after the sea gives up its own

Whale remains become an etching post for patterns

Frost bit hands work the blade inside the bone

Cracked open long and wide like a spine or smile

Under the treeless forest of stretching flat lands white

Screaming winds will stop at nothing to fill in zeros frozen

A wolf howls but thunder is louder under the pillowed clouds

Muffled hollow, drowned in the secrets found

Whispered outside where survival holds wolf to his fur

Somehow tempest gales grow angrier in the fractured arctic

Unpleasant voices are never heard again in winter sounds

About the hour of midnight around the ice house

Carved out of snow, rounded all about

A humble mother with child hide inside the dome

Covered in leather, camouflaged in white

Eskimos stay safe and warm away from trouble

Bitter cold never grows old on glaciers

Fear not the tumbleweed or desert fire

Tropical seas are only a dream of better weather

Here on the badlands life is measured in ice

Not in pounds of gold or silver snow fox

A sliver of light from a lost sun is peeking

Nights last forever under moon’s tutelage

Under the working blade confused by day

Cutting away summer from winter is a man

Carving out an igloo or whale bone tooth

Etching a future where fingers go numb

Light becomes a figment of the imagination

As a diminishing sun, a distant star fades away

Mother prepares Eskimo blubber pie for supper

Reviews

[Paul Shannon]

Outstanding imagery and excellent use of iambs

[Earl Schumacker]

Hi Paul, Thank you so much. Glad you enjoyed it. Have a great day. Earl