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Message: <blockquote data-quote="halftwo" data-source="post: 1695134" data-attributes="member: 45720">Ghosts Rising{-7.5 c at dawn}A colourless icy sky above a white world. All dead and gone. Empty fields, empty hedges, frozen waters.Sunrise shrinks the upturned bowl of the quarter moon, bright and low. Its light fades into its silvery background as the atmosphere takes on light, soaks up light and begins to reflect back colour, plummy orange to the west, yellow-orange and blinding in the east.Black-headed gulls head in over rising mists suddenly surrounding the landscape, swallowing it, softening it, white on white, bright over white, covering hedges and fences, half-swallowing horses - now floating bodies in paddocks, legless and unfocussed. The gulls' underwings dazzling white contrast their upperwing surfaces - which appear almost black, becoming some other, unknown species in their strangeness. Their sharp jags fade into fuzzy distance as they go.A Snipe from the mist rises silently, focusses in clearer sky above, needle bill stabbing air, and flaps away - back to the shroud. Hares' footprints track across the fields, deep and blurred, as if a memory. Now the sun skims powdery snow, millions of miniscule sparks whisper through the mists until the air itself glows ghostly, under a egg-blue sky.At the barn the only other birds gather around the edge of uncovered silage: hundreds of Starlings from ashes to half-fermented grasses, noisy and nervous - swirling in dark pools from imagined dangers - while Rooks and Jackdaws huddle in trees, black in white, vulturine and haggard. A Buzzard, fluffed owl-like against the cold, shrugs in the oak. In another field, beyond the blocked artery of the solid canal, its barges iron-gripped and frozen to the bank, three Rooks dig, with a brace of Pheasants, into a foot of snow-covered furrow, desperate and  hungry. All else has fled the glacial freeze, leaving the hibernating land, its slow heart an almost-stopped clock.</blockquote>

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