Ice thinning
Animals lost
In the heat of the sun
Home melting
Voice lost
In the strength of the wind
Scientific measures
Take away the atmosphere
Subtract our life to numbers
Telling me I cannot sense
I cannot see
How our world disappears
Into nothingness.
Yet we’ve
Never been stuck to a place
Aware of changes
Making living in the everyday
Not in labs miles away.
You say the sky you’re under
Cannot tell the history
Found in degrees C
But how to explain
The animals gone from our land
The paths we cross
Empty too early in the sea?
We are becoming the climate
But they say our voice cannot be
Heard.
Yet, we can fix the separation
Inhaling the icy air
Given from the skies
Embracing the rushing winds
Gifting us full of life
Tasting the same, single breath
Honoured by the falling snow.
The bears, the caribou sing with us too
Knowing we’ve always been connected
To the flows, and know
When it’s time to let go
And exhale
With our voices
Tied to the melting ice
We tell the stories
Our human rights
Of how if we accept this
As our home
Instead of a statistic on your phone
We can connect to it all
Make sense of the floods
Unite our sila
And breathe with love.
This poem explores (although not from an indigenous perspective) the Inuit notion of sila, meaning the unity of weather and climate, breath and atmosphere. Unlike in western science, the climate is not artificially abstracted for measurement, but "results from an ongoing rhythmic exchange across substances – between earth and sky, organisms and their environment."
With climate change, Inuit communities are continuing to use sila to show how ice is thinning and melting earlier, and animals are disappearing or changing migratory patterns. The hope is by returning to this interconnected breath, we can better understand our environment and make change.
By Louder Than The Storm writer Mattie O'Callaghan
