The North

The silent trees bear witness to our greed
day in day out they watch our folly grow
If I were an Eskimo a thousand words
for snow I’d have rather than wet,
powder or corn, no hunter’s
horn would break the
quietude of a vast
expanse of white
glowing in the
moonlight
while
I would
stalk seals
in the way my
fathers taught me
and their fathers taught
them for several thousand
generations before the internet
when our ESP still was fully operational
and a flotilla of Great Auks, the turkey of the sea
swam by my kayak at dawn to begin their feeding
and the giant sea cows of the North still plied its waters
the bounty of the ocean long before the garbage of civilization
stuck in the doldrums traveling in circles round and round matching
the futility of man with all his hopes and dreams and devastation they cost
they say limits of human knowledge are defined by when his resources run out