Text of Post-Glacial

The glaciers melt slowly in the sun.

The ice groans as it shrinks back to the pole.

Loud splits and cracks send shudders through the shoal

of herring struggling northwards, but they run

steadily on into the unknown roads

and the whole stream of life runs with them. Brown

islands hump up in the white of land, down

in the valleys a fresh drained greenness loads

fields like a world first seen, and when mild rains

drive back the blizzards, a new world it is

of grain that thrusts its frenzied spikes, and trees

whose roots race under the stamped-out remains

of nomad Grampian fires. Immensities

are mind, not ice, as the bright straths unfreeze.

Edwin Morgan (from Sonnets from Scotland)