Driving to Colorado by Dorothy Lawrenson

for Daniel 

Near Lubbock, cotton
fields become fields
of snow. 

 
A stave line with regular rests:
cotton bales by the roadside.

Black cattle in the red
dirt – longhorns,
and a donkey.

The red stalks
of stubble: broken
runic stuttering
to ogham,
a tally. Red

rocks and black cattle
stand in the snow. 

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Dorothy Lawrenson is a poet who writes in English and Scots. She earned her MFA at Texas State University and is currently a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2021 (Eyewear), A Year of Scottish Poems (Macmillan) and Be the First to Like This (Vagabond Voices). She was the winner of the Scots Prize in the 2019 Wigtown Poetry Prize.