The Present by Simon Armitage

I shove up through the old plantation – larch out of season, drab, drained of all greenness, widowed princesses in moth-eaten furs – and stumble out on the lap of the moor. Rotten and rusted, a five-bar gate lies felled in the mud, letting the fields escape. Winter is late and light this year, thin snow half puddled, sun still trapped in the earth, sludge underfoot all the way to the ridge. And none of the stuff that I came here to find, except in a high nick at the valley head where a wet, north-facing lintel of rock has cornered and cupped enough of the wind for running water to freeze. Icicles: once, I un-rooted some six-foot tusk from the waterfall's crystallised overhang, lowered it down and stood it on end, then stared at an ice-age locked in its glassy depths, at far hills bottled in its weird lens. These are brittle and timid and rare, and weep in my gloved fist as I ferry them home. I'd wanted to offer my daughter a taste of the glacier, a sense of the world being pinned in place by a diamond-like cold at each pole. But opening up my hand there's nothing to pass on, nothing to hold. This poem was written specially for the Keats-Shelley poerty prize. • This article was amended on 18 October 2010. In the original version we mistakenly included the first line from a different poem.