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?

I have looked at sunsets as long as they lasted
the reds and the golds and the pinks of them
the play of light on the edges of clouds
the changing shadows over the land.
I have watched the sea steadily rolling in wave after wave
breaking against the rocks with the energy of distant storms
or gently lapping at softer shores.
I have gazed up at the brilliance
of a black night of stars million upon million
no moon to dim their richness.
I have seen the hidden blues and greens in a slow river of ice.
I have known forests and mountains.

I have known you also and you no less
are part of the universe.  I can admire
the changing sky in the colour of your eyes
the moving sea in the curve of your neck
the wonder of an opening rosebud
in the crook of your elbow.

Waiting for a train,
I am thinking about nothing in particular
when ...
- "Excuse please.
Can you tell me?
What is Time?"

Time, that invisible dimension
in which we live
and grow
and die,
which goes relentlessly forward
and never back.
(Words move, music moves
only in Time, but that which is only living
can only die.)
Time, in which the future advances,
oh, so slowly
as you await the arrival
of the beloved,
and in which, as you grow older,
the past recedes
mercilessly faster
(Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
and the end and the beginning were always there
before the beginning and after the end).
Time, which rules
the natural world.
(The time of the seasons and the constellations,
the time of milking and the time of harvest).

Time, in which each observer is in a different moment,
according to where in the universe
you are standing,
and how fast
you are travelling through it.
(You are not the same people who left that station
or will arrive at any terminus ...)

- "Excuse please.
What is Time?"
Can I place that accent?
Ah yes, Russian...
No definite article in Russian,
no word for "the".

- Sorry, I was daydreaming.
It's half past two.

Such a wind today! The air
seems almost solid. Impossible
to go out in it.

Swifts invoking anti-gravity
lean on the air with sickle wings,
slice upward through it;
hang weightless at the peak,
then accepting the pull of earth,
hurtle downhill on kamikaze ski-run,
a mutual slalom, each avoiding
a hundred twisting obstacles;
alter their angle to the air, and rise again
up invisible gradients,
a swooping, soaring ballet with the wind,
its complex choreography
conceived in the tiny brains
of a hundred separate birds.

One pair, suddenly detached,
wings fluttering, wheel and plunge,
circle each other in an aerial
ice-dance pas de deux,
stunt kites without strings;
return to the flock, and are replaced
by another, and another, virtuoso couple.
The whole etherial stage is full
of improvisational star turns.

Such a wind! Impossible
for this earthbound human
to go out in it.
I'll stay and watch the show.

(based quite closely on The Naming of Cats by TS Eliot, my favourite poet, and one of the greatest writers of English poetry)

The showing of slides is a family matter,
It just isn't something to do to a chum.
Let the family watch while grandmothers natter,
But don't show outsiders those views of your mum.

First of all, at a pinch, try them out on the daily,
But watch for the yawns - you don't want her to leave.
Are you sure your wife liked them? Did she smile, or sigh greyly?
It can cause more divorces than you would believe.

Matching programme to audience you must be particular;
Consider the person, consider the slide.
If your buildings all lean from a neat perpendicular
Can you really expect to keep friends on your side?

The pick of the bunch you may show to another;
If you have any doubts, leave the slides on the shelf,
And reserve them for one who's more close than a brother,
And will truly enjoy them - just view them yourself.