MANY thanks to Lesley Duncan for drawing our attention to Norman MacCaig's beautiful poem, Explicit Snow (Poem of the Day, The Herald, January 15).

In discerning the difference between rain and snow, the poet says that the latter comes "from a place we feel we could go to". This inner longing and attraction to something timelessly familiar and yet mysterious, reminded me of a line in the best Hebrew poem I know, Job 38.

God is putting little Job in his place with a series of majestic questions: "'Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?" he asks. "From whose womb did the ice come forth and who has given birth to the hoar-frost of heaven?"

It's in the words of both poets and the silence which they enfold that scientists and theologians and all alike find common ground in the mystery of the universe which neither can penetrate with any degree of precision nor certainty.

Rev David D Scott,

The Manse, Preston Road, East Linton,

East Lothian.