Poem: "Sisters of the Once Snow"
Mar. 4th, 2025 04:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis is today's freebie. It was inspired by a prompt from new prompter crunchysteve. It also fills "The Last Ship" square in my 3-1-25 card for the Tolkien Bingo Fest. This poem belongs to the series Daughters of the Apocalypse.
"Sisters of the Once Snow"
[Cold Moon 1, 15 A.E.]
Lackshack was melting.
Well, the whole world was
melting, and everyone knew it,
but Lackshack was melting faster.
It had been melting for years --
decades -- and nobody had done
anything about it back when there
was still time to do something.
So now it was too late for
anything except for survival.
The women of Lackshack
were left to their own devices.
The last ship had come and gone
years ago -- even before the Grunge,
climate change had ravaged the lands
of the Frozen North to the point that
few people wanted to go there and
fewer could survive living there.
The people were back to kayaks
now, returning to the ways of
their ancestors as one by one
the modern motorboats failed.
They could get farther out to sea
because there was so much less ice,
which made travel access easier,
but the whales didn't like the change.
The polar bears were a problem.
They had been struggling for years
as humans encroached on their range,
but the loss of sea ice was hard on
mothers with cubs, and with less ability
to hunt for the seals from the pack ice,
all the bears were hungry all the time.
They broke into homes in search of
food, and sometimes even ate people.
On land, the shorelines slumped
toward the sea, and some villages
had fallen right into the water.
They moved inland as best
they could, but without help
from the collapsed governments,
they had to rely on traditional housing
such as igloos, tupiqs, and qammaqs.
They packed what snow there was into
slabs and piles so it would last longer.
The surviving women of Lackshack
trudged through the melting ice
and gathered what useful plants
they could from the wilderness.
It was almost all wilderness now,
but that was alright -- rewilding
the land might be its salvation.
So the women encouraged
the herds of caribou and
muskoxen to grow and eat
the vegetation in hopes of
retaining some ice cover.
They watched for rare plants
and noticed that more of them
grew where the common ones
were grazed away by the herds.
It wasn't enough, the women knew,
but it was what they had to work with.
They were the Sisters of the Once Snow,
and they would save whatever they could.
* * *
Notes:
January -- Winter Moon (Inupiat)
Arctic Permafrost Zones Map
Alaska Canada Territories Map
North America Cities Map
Lackshack is a large territory in North America spanning most of what was once Alaska, USA and Yukon Territory, Canada. (Southern Alaska is now the state of Lassa in the territory of Cascadia, Eastern British Columbia is now Cariboo, and Western British Columbia is now Coover.) Its name derives from the etymology of Alaska, the Eskimo word "alakshak" meaning "peninsula" or "great lands." It suffers from accelerated warming compared to the impacts of climate change on the rest of the planet.
The Frozen North refers to parts of North America that have some or total permafrost coverage, primarily Alaska north of its southwest coastline, and the northern half of Canada west of Hudson Bay. However, the permafrost is melting, so the boundaries are somewhat fluid.
Climate change is affecting everywhere, but it's worse in the Arctic. This damages the ecosystem, with negative impacts on whales and polar bears.
On the Alaskan coast, villages are sliding into the sea. The government offers nearly no help to people internally displaced by climate change.
Rewilding the Arctic can help slow climate change. Large herbivores like caribou and muskoxen eat common plants, leaving rare ones more space to grow, and improve albedo.
Traditional Arctic homes include igloos (ice houses), tupiqs (hide tents), and qammaqs (solid walls with a framework of bones and hide).
It's too late to avoid climate change, because it's already here. So, nature is going to solve the problem by eliminating the modern human. We're down to the harm reduction phase, just trying to minimize how bad it will get. However, there are practical steps that individuals can take to reduce their contributions to climate change.
crunchysteve. It also fills "The Last Ship" square in my 3-1-25 card for the Tolkien Bingo Fest. This poem belongs to the series Daughters of the Apocalypse."Sisters of the Once Snow"
[Cold Moon 1, 15 A.E.]
Lackshack was melting.
Well, the whole world was
melting, and everyone knew it,
but Lackshack was melting faster.
It had been melting for years --
decades -- and nobody had done
anything about it back when there
was still time to do something.
So now it was too late for
anything except for survival.
The women of Lackshack
were left to their own devices.
The last ship had come and gone
years ago -- even before the Grunge,
climate change had ravaged the lands
of the Frozen North to the point that
few people wanted to go there and
fewer could survive living there.
The people were back to kayaks
now, returning to the ways of
their ancestors as one by one
the modern motorboats failed.
They could get farther out to sea
because there was so much less ice,
which made travel access easier,
but the whales didn't like the change.
The polar bears were a problem.
They had been struggling for years
as humans encroached on their range,
but the loss of sea ice was hard on
mothers with cubs, and with less ability
to hunt for the seals from the pack ice,
all the bears were hungry all the time.
They broke into homes in search of
food, and sometimes even ate people.
On land, the shorelines slumped
toward the sea, and some villages
had fallen right into the water.
They moved inland as best
they could, but without help
from the collapsed governments,
they had to rely on traditional housing
such as igloos, tupiqs, and qammaqs.
They packed what snow there was into
slabs and piles so it would last longer.
The surviving women of Lackshack
trudged through the melting ice
and gathered what useful plants
they could from the wilderness.
It was almost all wilderness now,
but that was alright -- rewilding
the land might be its salvation.
So the women encouraged
the herds of caribou and
muskoxen to grow and eat
the vegetation in hopes of
retaining some ice cover.
They watched for rare plants
and noticed that more of them
grew where the common ones
were grazed away by the herds.
It wasn't enough, the women knew,
but it was what they had to work with.
They were the Sisters of the Once Snow,
and they would save whatever they could.
* * *
Notes:
January -- Winter Moon (Inupiat)
Arctic Permafrost Zones Map
Alaska Canada Territories Map
North America Cities Map
Lackshack is a large territory in North America spanning most of what was once Alaska, USA and Yukon Territory, Canada. (Southern Alaska is now the state of Lassa in the territory of Cascadia, Eastern British Columbia is now Cariboo, and Western British Columbia is now Coover.) Its name derives from the etymology of Alaska, the Eskimo word "alakshak" meaning "peninsula" or "great lands." It suffers from accelerated warming compared to the impacts of climate change on the rest of the planet.
The Frozen North refers to parts of North America that have some or total permafrost coverage, primarily Alaska north of its southwest coastline, and the northern half of Canada west of Hudson Bay. However, the permafrost is melting, so the boundaries are somewhat fluid.
Climate change is affecting everywhere, but it's worse in the Arctic. This damages the ecosystem, with negative impacts on whales and polar bears.
On the Alaskan coast, villages are sliding into the sea. The government offers nearly no help to people internally displaced by climate change.
Rewilding the Arctic can help slow climate change. Large herbivores like caribou and muskoxen eat common plants, leaving rare ones more space to grow, and improve albedo.
Traditional Arctic homes include igloos (ice houses), tupiqs (hide tents), and qammaqs (solid walls with a framework of bones and hide).
It's too late to avoid climate change, because it's already here. So, nature is going to solve the problem by eliminating the modern human. We're down to the harm reduction phase, just trying to minimize how bad it will get. However, there are practical steps that individuals can take to reduce their contributions to climate change.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-03-05 01:36 am (UTC)Sorry I was unable to attend virtually on the day, but time zones and fam. In some ways this storytelling makes me sadder than the emerging science about the region, because it humanises the effects. Feeling sad about this is good. We need to use that sadness to engender action, but also to find our own acceptance and survival strategies. Community, like your women characters in the region have in spades, is an important lesson. As life gets hotter here and less icy there, or unlivable in the outback or India, North Africa, etc, community will be survival's key.
Thankyou for taking my glib idea and making something poignant of it.