Red Deer

Once, after a storm, Too far back for my memory, I turned to the sprawl of the moor, Where the bleak flood of sky, Slashed fiery red across a silent sheet. I saw your tracks: Filling the wet blackness, You are shifting, The blind foliage rumpling. What can they fret at, say That they obscured? The lone snap of their sound, Their omitted breath, indistinct. Still, the thudding aches of their laughter You cannot see, roiling with threat. Time turns its eye, splits, draws taut and breaks, Like a wound-gloss, tight and painful.

• Ted Hughes