Winter: A Possibility

By City of Edmonton Poet Laureate, Mary Pinkoski

This poem was written on-the-spot after listening to two days of dialogue at the City of Edmonton’s Winter Cities ShakeUp Conference and performed at the conference, as well on Thursday, January 29, 2015.

As we sit here on Treaty 6 territory
In the most northerly large city on the continent
With the snow on the ground,
Gathering in an honouring of history
and a spirit of innovation and ingenuity
Let us begin with the start of an incredible story

Let us begin with the impossibility of an adventure
The story of a canoe flying across the sky,
an elephant parading down a street,
a frozen water jug of a party on the Baltic sea,
a city plan mimicking the frame of a reindeer’s antlers,
an avalanche of skiing santas,
a bicycle plunging through the snow,
a family thinking they are going to live in a refrigerator
Grafting themselves onto another family tree whose lineage is stretched in linking icy veins with a sister city in China

Let’s begin right here
with a snowglobe sitting in the middle of the city
If you believe in all this dreaming
mixed with a little bit of legend
And a dash the extraordinary
This adventure is not so impossible

For as the story has been told to us:
the creator does not make mistakes
And if we believe that to be true
Then all this dark, this cold, this ice
Is in fact not so impossible

It is rather an expanding possibility,
It is a 25 year old skating festival weaving silver dreams into a project to skate to work
Sliding us into a Birkebeiner that glides into dreams of skiing through our city’s downtown forests and sustainably built housing on the way to the LRT
Sparking us into noticing the way the light dances off the Ice on Whyte and the Byzantine glory cradled in a deep freeze
Until we break this vast, stillness and we with the grace of bulls crush ice
in a city-wide snowball fight
That sleds us all down into the river valley’s outdoor playground

And, boy, do we ever play here
Yes, we have also been the story of struggle of building a life on snow banks and river banks
Of Edmontonians so delighted to live in a city of opportunity they wintered in tents Until their houses were built
Of settlers in sod dugouts
Of indigenous peoples sharing survival stories
And the cleansing beauty of snow
Of blizzards and snow storms
Of icy roads and weather reports proclaiming us
“the coldest place on earth and beyond today, even colder than Mars”

You can be certain there is a brave resilience here, a thriving
But in all this, there is also a tenacious and creative spirit calling out
that there is a rising up here
Just as the temperature can only dip so low before
It once again begins to rise
We are the mercury in the thermometer and we are rising
Beyond the data, beyond the narratives, beyond the impossible
For if you let it, everything breaks
The cold snap, the thermometer

Until we become the dancing beads of mercury
Shimmering ourselves into a glittering transformation
That refuses to be captured,
Refuses to be box stepped into the old familiar of
“its too cold to go outside” and “winter is boring”
“winter is isolating and depressing”

If you have ever watched mercury move across a surface,
If you have ever tried to separate it,
You will see how it clings to its parts

Mercury knows it is lonely to dance alone
Let us not let winter become the surface which separates us

For the love of winter,
let us instead become the beginning of a new disruptive dance
A movement,
that can only happen when you illuminate the darkness
Find joy in snowfall, take a fieldtrip that lets you cast the city in a new light
To make new definitions of this place, and that place of this city,
my city and your city
And share in this celebration of discovery

For we are taking others along on the journey
Young and old
Those new to this city
and those just new to stepping outside in winter

we are a community, we have always been,
And we are telling the story of us,
A story where winter lives in our very DNA

So to embrace winter,
Is to embrace ourselves

For we are incredible
We are beyond belief
We are a city that has the tools to move itself
Into the realms of the extraordinary
Into the stuff legends are made of
Into the components of a dream
That you have and that I have
And that we all have

A dream that is scattering itself like
A snowfall across the city

So let it blanket us,
Inspire us,
Cloak what we do in its inspiration
And then: let’s make tracks for others to follow our creations

Science tells us the story that when water freezes the molecules slow down assuming a fixed position
And when they are heated back up the molecules once again begin to move,
To bump into one another, to shake
Science says all this freezing and melting happens at the same point
at zero degrees Celsius
It is a very magical thing to realize that at two very different potentials can exist
In the same place, at the same time

We are at a magical point today.
We could say we are at the freezing or the melting point.
The best point in the project,
The beginning
Where the intersection of dream and design
First make contact, bump up against each other
Start the tentative first steps of a dance of discovery.
We are at the point of possibility,
The first line of an incredible story is being written
Right here in this room.
Something adventurous is happening
Something magical is happening.
We are standing in a snowglobe,
And we are getting ready to shake things up