Winter: An
A snowflake
Came like a white butterfly on his nose.
His mother’s bucket
Was blue splashings at the well.
And grandpa was notching hooks like stars on his lines
Down at the noust.
The school locked for Yule
-Time was a bird with white wings.
A swan on the loch
Bent its head like a flower.
He was lost on the hill till sundown
In a dream of snow.
Hunger and lamplight
Led the wanderer home.
A black peat stirred
Unsheathed claws like a cat
On the purring hearth.
One white star
Walked slow across the pane.
George Mackay Brown