A Winter's Tail

Just read the terms of the challenge and realised this isn't from my childhood. Doh!!

A Winter’s Tail

Shrill phone pierces the small hours

Wrenched from my warm pit, duty calls

Heifer calving- making nothing of it

An out the side job

The night is deathly still, not a soul is stirring

All around the suffocating white blanket lies thick

A freezing haar hangs suspended, eerie

Scared to touch this alien landscape

The Lochside road’s a Cresta run

Ploughs piled snow drifts above my head

Descend the chute through the amber glowed street

And back into the black void

Steading lights, a siren on the hill

The persistent moth, my trusty Subaru

Bulldozes snow over the bonnet

Must keep moving

Old Sandy waits, knarled and lined

Just watering eyes betray his fear

Like the wide eyes of my patient

Steam rising from her fusing with breath in the cold air

Her thick blood warms my hands

A scarlet pool in the white ground

A glistening calf lands with a slippery wet flop

It’s spartan crib of straw and snow

The dark silence heightens the suspense

Only blue-grey instinctive guttural lowing, urging, pleading

Before a blink, a head shake

New life enters this dead of night