Herefordshire’s young poet laureate Sapphire de Sousa Stayton has written a poem to mark the snowy weather conditions that have gripped the county.

Sophie, who won the Poet Laureate for Herefordshire competition run by the council’s libraries service in June 2009, has been using her time off school constructively to pen a poem about her own experience of the snowy weather.

The poem is:

Smelling Snow

A fragment of a second,
A minute less than time,
It was gone before I realised
That it was there and mine.

It was faster than the speed of light,
As calming as the sea.
As confusing as a Labyrinth
Of which you can’t get free.

It had the wonder of a waterfall,
The intensity of the sun.
The freeness of a child
In the meadow having fun.

It brought me all my memories
Of winters, Christmases past.
Hanging out the stockings,
Building snowmen in the park.

On that calm day in October,
When the sun was slipping low,
That moment in early autumn,
That’s when I smelt the snow.