Fate gave the word, the arrow sped (Robert Burns)

Everyone wakes in the small hours:
lungs furred with broken air, faces
burned with snow. How did we arrive
in this lonely place when just last night 
we went to bed with our mothers’ milk 
still warm on our lips, our fathers’ 
reassuring silhouettes standing tall
in every bedroom doorway?

And we listened to the owls, 
the answering twit and twoo, 
urgent yeowls of mating foxes, 
a freight train passing through. 
Then dawn cracked apart
to the echo of the last owl’s twoo, 
everyone alone, bones bathed blue.

Cover photo credit: Polly Pullar

Lynn Valentine

Lynn Valentine lives in the Black Isle. Her debut poetry collection, Life’s Stink and Honey, was published by Cinnamon Press in 2022 after winning their literature award. Her Scots pamphlet, A Glimmer o Stars, was published by Hedgehog Poetry in 2021, She is working on her next collection for Cinnamon Press.

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