The Inuit and Aleut don't really have
twenty-seven different words for "snow" and "ice,"
but for the purposes of this poem
they might as well.

We might also add that Anglo-Saxons and
other Germanic Norse tribes of the Dark Ages
had fifty-four words for "vagina,"
including the very poetic "maidenhead"
and "whispering eye."

Ancient Mandarin, nineteen characters for "sword,"
but forty-three for "rice"--
not counting the fifteen spoken words
to discriminate cooked from raw, steamed from fried
from sticky-ball, wild from domestic.

Pre-Unification Hawaiians had only one word for "pineapple,"
but Kamehameha VII's (also called Kamehameha, the Feeble)
magnum opus was to regulate
a usage dictionary for the inflections
en vogue among his people, including:
"paí-NÄ-pō" for generic,
"pine-ĦÆ-pōL" for the imperative,
"PÂI-na-po," diminutive,
"¿pai-nä-ppel," interrogative,
and "P¥-ÑĄ-POLE," the expletive.

For all this, there is no word in English
of any variety, any dialect
of the Mother-tongue of a new era
(a language which adds "sushi" and "adios"
to its dictionaries),
not one word that approximates
the feeling of living in borrowed skin,
epiphanizing your ancestral and memetic inheritance
in a tidal pull of lunar clarity.