To a young daughter
Sore as the sorest thumb you think
you’re sticking out like, clubbed today
by differentness, cut off, left out,
I’d fold you up in ugly-duckling
promises of future perfect
sisterhood revealed, but then
I think of swans, those debutantes
who grace the loch in glossed parade -
that brutal elegance, that blank
exactitude! - and I recall
instead the mountain hare, whose pelt
pulsates with light and dark, a beat
that’s metered by her essence, not
the world’s erratic seasons; who,
beneath a mild December sky
(no snow to coat the bog-black peat,
to smooth the stalky heather), finds
herself a radiant dissident,
her bluewhite glow a lonely vote
for somewhere else’s winter. Spied,
she freezes in a bid to fade,
to vanish, doomed by what she is;
her fear’s apparent, yet we see
beneath it beauty she cannot -
herself: so frail, so clear, so true.
