​You can’t yet believe, even though you see it.
Farmers would’ve noticed by now.
It’s more silly than sinister
in this tight southern landscape.

Do you remember how that snowflake landed on your girlfriend’s arm
as you climbed onto the tow-path from the bridge before Mytholmroyd?
The shape of it was too perfect,
too much like a snowflake,
surely the mood was set even then
for something like this to happen in a place such as this.

Think again to those stories you pooh-poohed
in those tabloids that your Grandma claimed
she only bought to line the budgie cage;

watch these stories realised, stalking the canal’s far bank,
legs much too long to be common-or-garden,
until time leads you to an open fire and a peat-black stout,
a place to mull it over and to search
if anyone here’s seen the same,
while outside, fields through which wander you now know not what
grow slowly whiter, and the sky slowly dark. 

Jacob O’Sullivan grew up in Castletown, Isle of Man, in a haunted old watermill. He has had poems published in Manx Lit Fest, The Open Ear, and The North. He currently lives in Leith, Edinburgh, and recently went on a pilgrimage to visit The Wicker Man filming locations in Galloway. Socials: @JacobOsullivan 

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