Dispatch from Siberia

They live and work along the northern edge of land

where ice touches down every fall, later and later now,

and not as far south, so that walrus—tens of thousands

of long-toothed soft brown bodies—have immigrated

farther north and now gather just outside

their towns, beach en masse and wait for the ice

which is later and later, so that these men,

with their wide stances and wider smiles, armed with nothing

but sticks and the sense that generations of northern living

have given them, pray to their spirits and protect those walrus,

at first from polar bears, moving in waves along the coast,

roaming wide in search of food, following scent of walrus

and then carried out on that ice, staying with ice as it

recedes so far that they have not come back, those bears,

to this shore, and are either drowned or starved or moved

to other shores, Canada or Greenland, where ice still stays near,

and now from curious townspeople and foreign tourists,

circling near and clicking cameras and causing stampedes

in which thousands, pups and their mothers, are trampled

to death, so these brave men, armed with nothing

but sticks and a belief in the world they inhabit, carry

the carcasses far from town, leave them to feed

passing polar bears, and the first year, over one hundred bears

came and ate every morsel, but since then, with the ice

carrying the bears away, the mound of carcasses remains

rotting on the tundra, on this northern shore

where these men, smiles as wide as ever, continue to believe.