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On the clock-ice*, fissured by woolly gigantelopes,
the pilofile's bristled beak opens wide for insects
that waft about in the emergent summer, as cold shockles
melt to reveal the snaw grimet ground beneath.
No allts nor ards in this forsaken landscape, only
flatness all around, and the horned woolly ones roam
over firns and fievels, clearing snow from tiny plants
to feed on as their broad hooves arrest snow-sinking.
The female bardelot, saber-toothed, stalks
the gigantelope after the heavy sheebones melt,
while the pilofile sheds its bristles to grow a long bill
for food-ferreting and flinks about the flower-strewn tundra.
When the wolfsnows arrive in their cold fury
the bardelots, gigantelopes, and pilofiles migrate south to
less austere conifers in their petts and pingles, a wildwood
safe from the shape-shifting snow-devils of the far north.
* These poems use words from Robert MacFarlane's Landmarks and animal names from Dougal Dixon's A Zoology of the Future.