The reindeer are back!
Like a blessing from the earth -
A living cloud of hope,
Thundering across the frozen, treeless plains.
Who has sent them?
Why do they return every season to battle the roaring
current of a swollen river?
Why do they annually make that epic journey,
Returning like a mystery in the breath of the keen west wind
With their precious sacrificial gift?
Their skin, their fur, their meat, their bones
Grant us life in a bleak icy continent where every day is a
struggle to survive
And the future is a place too uncertain to contemplate.
And yet, they are here again,
Eyes bulging with purpose
As they furiously kick away the tug of the river's undertow
To scramble, bedraggled and shivering on the shore of our
homeland hopes.
And that is why I am scraping and chiselling their likeness
Into the tusk of a mammoth;
Their image buried deep in my eyes,
Slowly revealing itself in lines of moving force:
A stag with his doe are swimming through the ivory,
Gasping for air, antlers bent back, legs at full stretch.
That is why I am whittling with my stone knife,
Rubbing paste into the cuts;
Pulsing blood into a solid thing,
So that when they have finished their rutting
And new life bleats its fragile entrance,
Slimy and staggering, beached on a world of ice,
Ready to follow nature's flow back to the source;
We can look at the tusk and see them there, still -
Swimming toward us from the past,
Remembering how they always return.
Because the great lumbering mammoth,
A gigantic bolder of flesh and bone, as big and grand as it
is,
Seems to be dwindling away,
And is rare as green grass in a patch of molten snow.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/DyfP6g6dRN6WdwdnbIVbPw
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