Undulant waves of sorrow wash over her drawn face
Crouching on the cool gray ground
The foundling imagines an egress into the hoary land from the tales of her grandmother
Where clever ravens would lead her to Sedna, the mother of the sea
On her loving back, she would ride on a seal skin kayak
Under a wide expanse of northern sky,
She would feel the true weight of her anirniit, her spirit
Now, she imagines her soul, once as plenary as the full moon, broken into icy, jagged crescents
She glances at the book in her hands, the text a familiar road
Once traveled
Many times retraced.
Desolate for what was never hers, she rises
Out the window, an afflatus falls
Cool white spheres of condensed intimacy
A million mothers, softly covering the ground in a blanket of alabaster ice
She imagines herself the northern sea
Freezing over in the winter
But melting in the spring