The frozen Dialect of the Tundra

How wet when melted and yet now
it cannot quench. What it does not

swallow like rocks, crops, or whole
villages, it shuts out in the cold.

Damn we say and we mean God.
Mercy we write, white on white

broken letters in the snow
glinting like petroglyphs.

We say Ice which means do not yield.
In northern nowhere, the flint sky

has no spark for us, and what we love
most doesn’t have wings. The ground

knows why we hold each other
shivering and only the wind is never full.