‘And what’s the snow that melts the soonest?’
Mercy was thirteen, maybe fourteen.
‘And how would you catch a yellow bittern?’
She was halfway down the mountainside

Before I realized. ‘I would be right glad
If you knew next Sunday.’ Her parting shot
Left me more intent than Lancelot
Upon the Grail. Or whoever it was, Sir Galahad.

‘A yellow bittern?’ I’d consulted Will Hunter,
Who carried a box of matches
And had gone himself to the pictures.
He wrinkled his nose, ‘I know green linnets

You take with just a pinch of salt
On their tails. That’s according to most people.
A yellow bittern. They might be special.’
‘And the snow that’s first to melt?’


I’d got that wrong. He was most certain.
‘The snow that scarcely ever lies
Falls on a lady’s breasts and thighs.’
That week stretched longer than the Creations!

We climbed the hills together to the highest hill-farm
Without a word of snow or bittern
And viewed the extravagant wilderness
Of the brawling townlands around Moy.

The cries from the football field grown so dim
We might be listening on the wireless.
When I’d all but forgotten that she’d forgotten
Mercy would take me in her arms.