It dawned on us at last,
the madness of our coming here:
how we’d deceived ourselves,
taken the sun’s feeble rays for warmth.
Now we saw only dreary years ahead,
the numbing cold, the snow – and worse, the melting.
Belief faded.
Our shamans turned to hide-stitching
and boot-making
yet found a kind of renewal
faced with the harsh geography
of having nowhere else to go. They enlivened us
with comedy, tales of the gods
who, with all their powers, got it wrong,
whose conjurings caused ruin.
We thought the gods no better than us
for, mortals that we were
and quite unmagical, we yet found ways
of being what we knew we must become:
snow-bodied, with the pulse in us
of winter’s whiteness, every year
renewed, and beating like a spring in Eden.
Donald Adamson
Donald Adamson writes in English and Scots. He won First Prize in the Sangschaw Competitions of 2017, 2022, and 2025. In 2025 he was also awarded the Brian Whittingham Memorial Prize and the Federation of Writers flash fiction prize (Scots), and shortlisted in two categories of the Wigtown Poetry Competition.