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.