A winter walk before the dawn

After the year when we crossed the 1.5 degree line

Heel bones like hammers, driven by the great steam-powered articulations of hip and femur. I am become monstrous, pounding the dumb bell of the frozen ground. Pacing the empty winter world, head down, sensors scanning left and right for any sign that there is more than me. To no avail. No sound but the grinding crux and crisis of the snow’s icy crust, mutilated with every step. The stars themselves, caught out, naked in an open sky, wince at my approach. I can hear their sharp intake of breath, appalled, when I turn my eyes to fondle their familiar faces. They had hoped not to see again the colossus rising and surmising and standing astride the little blue world of which they are so fond.

Ah, be done with them. There is always the dancing river, so elegant in her rills and riffles. An old friend. A stalwart friend. But on this murderous morning she is strangely reserved. Holding herself back behind newly constructed palisades of ice. Unwilling to meet my gaze.

So there it is. Finally, we have forced even the river to pick a side. Sheltering under the shadows of the far bank, unseen, stands the assassin. A grey heron, her stiletto beak concealed in her cloak until the last moment. Through the curtains of darkness she makes her thrust, a needle-sharp shriek of final judgement. Her blade glances off a rib and lodges next to my heart.

Has the heron, consummate professional that she is, not yet understood that we are invincible? That I will carry this wound like all the others. That it will barely slow me down.

Still and all. A monster has his soft spots. A tyrant would be loved. A despoiler, weary of his pillaging, circles back to tenderness. And I know a secret place where even on this bitter morning, when standing water rings shrill like an anvil, a flush of green moss holds out the possibility of redemption.

Down in the founds of an old drystone wall, the white-knuckle roots of an ancient ash tree hold open a sacred space. A crypt, a sanctuary where a little warmth trickles upwards from the planet’s dreaming. A small seepage of possibility. Wrens cluster there, three as one, gathered in Gethsemane. Their territories and kingdoms erased, their summer rivalries discarded. A bedlam of tiny hearts, eyes closed tight to hold back the agony of the coming frozen dawn. At sunrise their accounts will be totted up and the gram of fat that saw them through the night must somehow be repaid.

As I crouch in silent penitence by the cave’s entrance, isn’t this love enough? Aren’t we connected, these tiny birds and I? Oh, but I am making a fool of myself. Let me not dare to speak of love again until I have learnt to walk softly on frozen ground.

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