"Blue-Shirt
stood tall and
black, like a crag.
His limbs were hairy and icy.
His beard was frost, and there was snow
on his shoulders. He was His own ice-mountain.
His mail-shirt bristled with ice-spears. He seemed
to embody everything heavy and hard and fixed, that even
human
influences on global weather patterns in turn influence cultural
and econ-
nomic patterns, creating a feedback
loop, a 'carbon time bomb' that alters nature
nature while destroying
this
round of civilization. If there is hope for future generations,
wind
and sand must be weary in wearing away. His eyes burned horribly in His
blackish
face, and He gnashed and gnashed His teeth. And no steam came from his breath,
but only mist."
Bjarne
Herjulfsson,
Lief Eriksson, Erik the Red,
Erik
Blodøks (Erik Bloodaxe),
to name a few,
sailed through northern
mists centuries before
Sir
Hugh Willoughby and sixty-four of his crew,
marshalled a parade of Anglo frigates frozen
by the tempests of arctic hagiography.
With
glaciers melting, bodies rise to the surface, farting beyond
where the North Wind
originates; here, the Homeric hymns say, live the Hyperboreans, a fortunate people
who reside in a
sacred wood with a large round temple dedicated to the gases of
sanguineous tales,
inflated with a appetite
for celebrity.
Windbreaker,
a deflated sail;
battered hat hangs on a peg,
a
bowed head;
on a cold stove woolen hands hiss.
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