Winter Star

Five Christmas Stars
1 Spinning Wheel
The wheel utters a long grey line,
        An old woman
        Is turning her wheel at the fire.

The sun goes behind the hill.
        She lights a lamp,
         The wool lies in a drift on the floor.

Some winter morning
         She'll waken to a web of whitest wool
         Hung over the tall straw chair

For a bridal or a christening
          Or for a shroud at harvest.

2 Bairn Song

What does Dapple say in the Byre ?

Dapple says
                  'They give me turnips and hay by lantern light.
                   Last summer
                   God gave me grass and clover,
                   Sun, wind, a blue sky, a green hill , dew in the morning
                   And I gave them milk, butter, cheese '
That's what Dapple's saying Bairn
In the byre on Yule morning.

3 Stars and Fish

The sky shoal is out tonight,
          Stars in a surge !

Two fish on a blue plate
Suffice
For one croft, for the great world hunger.

4  Solstice

' How shall we know 
The sun
Won't grow weaker and frailer yet
Till he's the dead King
With hair frail as snowflakes
And a star locked in his eye ? '  ......

In the croft ben room
A bairn sleeps
Through a night of storm and star gifts.

5. Star

No more fishing till after Yule,
Haddock
              Will glimmer silent through cold gray halls
The tractor is locked in the barn
With a sack of seed.

The hill humps like a white whale,

The glimmer of one star
    one a shore boulder, where the ebb begins. 

George Mackay Brown