APPROPRIATELY, our final sample from Second Wind, a new anthology challenging stock assumptions about ageing, is set in spring. Vicki Feaver is the poet. The book is published by the Saltire Society in association with the Scottish Poetry Library, at £7.

OLD WOMAN IN A FORSYTHIA BUSH

Bright bush of yellow stars

reaching out to me with long

bowed wands, among fields

ringing with blackbird songs;

where lambs, licked into life

by sheep’s rough tongues,

leap like ballet dancers,

impossibly high, as if hung

on strings of a great puppeteer

who dangled me when young,

exciting me to strip of vest

and bra to celebrate spring;

and, now I’m old, whose arms

have dragged me through the long

dark corridors of another winter

to sit on this sunny seat, among

starry stems of forsythia,

buoyant again, as if sprung

from my body and floating

above it, like a seed flung

from the grey head of dandelion.