FIFE-BASED John Burnside has won the Saltire Society's Scottish Book of the Year Award with a volume of short stories.
Here, however, he is in poetry mode in a piece from his 1988 collection, The Hoop (Carcanet).
LOST
The fog walks down the hill and finds our yard:
curious, like a tourist, filling up
corners, measuring spaces, rescuing
mystery from the commonplace. We take
no little pride in our slight membership
of this all-knowing whiteness; echoes fall
two yards away and plunge into the deep
beside us, like the voices in a well,
and home was unremarkable until
it disappeared into the hinterland
behind our practised blindness, where we keep
private forests, mountains, shifting sands
on lucid, instinct maps of holy ground
we render to the fog when we are found.
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