Orienteering outside Jedburgh
Wildcat Cleuch is still full of snow
but each virtual contour
is marked with bunting
white feather gauges
signalling it is warm here.
These birds have come from Norway
to tease out mountain atoms, kernels
and midge crumbs.
Why they stopped in Lanton
is anybody's guess. The wind?
Or their own internal magnets?
Oh they look so good –
the geologists of snow
perched where this science was invented.
In theory, the whole
hill is now tame plantation
but suddenly each snow flake
bunting flocks
anti-cycling back into blue sky
mapping the weather back home.
Bridget Khursheed is a poet and geek based in the Scottish Borders. She is a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award winner for poetry and her video poem Dead Loss features in the current Scottish Poetry Library Vision 2020 project. Her pamphlet Roads to Yair is published by Twinlaw and she is widely published in magazines including Ambit, The Rialto, Abridged, New Writing Scotland, Zoomorphic and Gutter. When not writing she has been studying for an MSc in cybersecurity. You can find her on Twitter here: @khursheb.