'hear yourself rustling in the silence, smell frost-needles fastening hair ...'
'Firebridge to Skyshore'
All morning the mist curled around its threads until finally, my hair froze, just like my poem. I was become another rimed thing in the landscape. Only we weren't in the Arctic but in the hills of Hathersage, Derbyshire. At 8.30 am, the sun was a shrunken disc above Carl Wark. Barely luminous at all. The intricate textures of this world lay revealed in crystals and dendrites.
All morning the mist curled around its threads until finally, my hair froze, just like my poem. I was become another rimed thing in the landscape. Only we weren't in the Arctic but in the hills of Hathersage, Derbyshire. At 8.30 am, the sun was a shrunken disc above Carl Wark. Barely luminous at all. The intricate textures of this world lay revealed in crystals and dendrites.
Feathery rings of wood grain on a post; a lattice of splinters in a bootprint; frost blossoms bursting on the heather. Up on the heights, rocks crouched like giants petrified in the mist. Spectral sounds drifted through of a crow kaarking, a sheep bleating, my stick clink-clinking a frozen puddle. The moorland's thorny trees were black fractals in the gloom. Under an overhang, icicles exploded along grass stems and erupted into bubble-wrap on a boulder.
Susan and I are both writers who draw creative sustenance from this season. I've written nothing new this past month, beyond blogs and reviews, but I have been squirreling away nuggets of thought, creamy tubers of winter sweetness. We're busy firing off applications for Polar Poet gigs, mainly at summer festivals, and when we're telling tales of the Arctic, this time will be our hoard of inspiration.
