How does Anne Wilkinson answer the question "who are we here" in her poem "Winter Sketch, Rockcliffe, Ottawa"?

In the poem "Winter Sketch, Rockcliffe, Ottawa," Anne Wilkinson uses unrelenting imagery of snow to depict a community "dismembered by two worlds." Who the community is when snow arrives to "etherize" it is rendered a separate thing to whom it is the rest of the time, when its "hard arteries" are free-flowing. Wilkinson's language presents the town as a person undergoing anesthesia, the snow like an anesthetic holding it still.
The overwhelming nature of the snowfall is echoed by the number of descriptors Wilkinson uses to depict it: "polar," "frostbite," "storm of white," "tusked with icicles," "stuporous in slow white sand." As a reader, we cannot escape the snow, just as the town cannot.
The community itself as presented in the poem is divided, the men "dismembered by two worlds." To them, we can infer, the snow is largely an inconvenience, but this renders them unable to appreciate its beauties as the children do, their "uncurled ears" perceiving in the polar landscape what their elders cannot. The snow is, in truth, a protector, a "winding sheet" for "our myth-told-many-a-bed-time tale." Wilkinson uses extended metaphor to emphasize the idea of the landscape as mother or nursemaid, the snow simply a blanket enveloping it "till April swells the shroud to breast," its "milky... encrusted nipples" providing succor for the spring bloom.
There is an innocence in the children of the community which is underlined through Wilkinson's references to "Christ"; as the children "christen" their snow creations, so also do they celebrate their own innocence in the purity of the snow: making angel shapes in it, they say, " dare the snow my wings to keep." The snow blankets and conceals what is impure or apparently "hard" in the community, and makes it appear clean again.