Seventeen Words Poem by Paul Hansford

No more the picturebook Eskimo,
the modern Inuit have central heating,
snowmobiles, welfare; they do not need
to fashion harpoons from bone, wait all day
for seal to come to ice hole, drag the body
to a home they have built from snow.

Once they lived with cold
and the creatures of the cold,
fish, seal, and white bear, familiar
if not friends, the snow itself
almost alive in its moods and movements,
falling as flakes, powder, clumps,
floating, flying, dazzling, stinging,
covering, drifting, compacting to ice.
Snow informed their lives;
one word was not enough.

Our life from infancy to grave
is shaped by love, comforting, calming,
thrilling, unsettling, dazzling, stinging,
covering, drifting, compacting to....

Seventeen words for snow,
How many ways to say I love you?