winterlight the bare trees gather anyway

& the grey heron moves their fish-eye lens to scan & discard you as you pass, following a burn to see where it leads (a large alder is anchored in rashy ground), make a boat of rushes & let the wind take it, tip of its mast a small flame

key handover day & the last leaving, greylag standing to attention last eyes on you as you go

& deep blue time the jackdaws return to the shed across the way tilting wings to slate as they angle under & up

up to the lochan to watch it work evening sky - 5 mallards dabble dark water (teal begins landing circle, then spirals back up), pause at spindly alder & fail to find the song thrush singing from thicket (mauve & fade then), bullcalves rumbling in yr blindspot, huffing the line of their field

it might seem silly & I accept this but a gifted green man has come with us to rents 20 years & went today to retreive it & see the mark it left

& mid-afternoon a red kite bearing carrion feasts behind the broadband, monitored by a corvid calling in reinforcements; exit kite, still bearing load, pursued by kleptoparasites

imbolc & soft light - the dark half into its slow waning - fieldfares foraging widely & mid-afternoon the strong, ink-black progress of a heron, issuing a raawrk to acknowledge being seen

last of january: redwing in headlights & heron sailing over the lanes (the roil & unsettle of sky), a month of rupture & upset, journalled & put by.

& the wearing gears of a long month, sleet at dawn & thin hill snow - dead badger at the bridge & 1st hesitant movements of a thrush's early song

& out for elevation & distance from Microsoft white, a bold rook taking prospect when you stop to look back, & in the rashy field below the house the moon flicks over bogpools & western sky blanches - back by the yard's robin, singing in the boiler's warm kerosine fug

& up through the tunnel of tangle with light still in the sky - storm breaking up or reforming, depending on which app you believe - tendrils swipe evergreen from the back step, a blue-light burns down the main drag, siren off

& twilight since 1st light, jackdaws in waves back & forth - woodpigeons bank coming the other way - & a dunnock trying voice along the margins of the field; ask a neighbour about barn owls & they tap the side of their nose & wink, & you are happy to take patience & time

pull up as a group of geese peel out of daylong gloom cambering to avoid cables you only notice by their turn

& 1st clear sky to peg washing, take it all in under setting moon

back late, wind down the window to smell the night: barn owl deathray screech close enough yr hair stands on end

& 17.20 pick up mail at the backdoor (address still unfamiliar), find a fine line

& from higher up, glens & waterways filling with mist that will rise & falter. the air is full of small whirring birds, graphite in gloom (you hear coal tit, great tit, chaffinch, robin scribbling territory, blackbirds dinking & rummaging). a quadbike bubbles towards you & its rider stops to chat.

begin again. unfamiliar gradients & nooks that do not know you. the buzzard is a stranger & grey heron shows clean set of heels. a lochan floats rotting ice. hazel catkins figure given season: start there.

back & forth along the lanes all afternoon (the guy runs the dump rolls his eyes & grins yr last trip of the day), pass fields of pinkfeeted geese (folded wings of slate & lime), skies glow indigo 15.00 (slide & rattle of shifting cargo)

pause one moment at time light ekes itself out (the weightbearing sky), tired with sorrow & hope - & on

darker than it looks (but before starlight sharpens), rush hour on the main drag drowned out by a tawny owl quibbling & squalling, testing what kind of night it is (bitter in tone)

t: 1st thing, all under the waning crescent - a skite-on-ice morning of gather & frantic movement, grasping & stowing, & slow letting go

-1: first thing, the land receding; above, the scattered grammar of movement

t -2. snowdrops unfurling lamps. the old & confidential turning to ash. night reeking in. familiar becoming unfamiliar.

& a house sparrow neighbour roosts above the backdoor, face to the wall & out of the wind, cooried

greywash, new water on old ice (the river working hard through its guts & straights, under steelspan & humpback - pause on the latter, eye-level to withered haws, blackthorns uselessly skewering raindrops)

& above frozen burn the gorse in flower - in the field beyond a big Navarro makes wide circles, window down - a small boy in his da's lap laughs as he is allowed to turn the wheel in a huge, empty field

& a brief softening - rotting ice on roads & ditches, a warming the thermometer reports but you do not feel; the longroad's buzzard is at their usual stretch, monitoring treestumps the barnowl also knows

& escape the screen late at time of last checks on the hill, time the transmitter renders its vertical ellipsis (a great spotted woodpecker broadcasts a sequence of gappy yeeps), headlights of yr partner's car shine warmly & on time

& dawn is a strip ripped east geese pass over as you scrape the windscreen bleak january backroad then headlights on glitter of unfestive frost

& ragged icelines on the backroad's burn, blue to the north where snow claims a foothold; SW holds brightness & chill latest & last, pure cold rolling in upper air

sixth. dry hail chased by thick, wet sleet. traction light flashing until tyres bite. a pair of little egrets hunker under wind. main drag a gritter named calvin-hair-ice.

brief afternoon errand, divert to crump shallow into woods where the pool has frozen over - & this place of still & pause remains safe from pry of afternoon sun

fifth. up from the screen into bonechill & colour. the burn refuses ice by moving quickly, troughs are frozen solid. skiddaw's summit contoured by snow. you message a neighbour their home is in conjunction with jupiter.

& at the river winter's work: bridges & islands of ice (the many different characters of crystal & filament) - the sound of the flow is new & subdued, too (slightest hint of tiny snowflakes falling &, behind you, a small, brown hare)

5 days' hard frost: on the river, archipelagoes of ice

& rise of full quiet moon (cold corvid moon?), 1st of 2026 (so long hill & river moon, time of moonlight flitting)

from Corrie Williamson, 'Mercy Me' in _Attached to the Living World_ (2025)

purple hour & jupiter rising the day's ice & the night's moon pitted & cracked

1st. Solway. huge skies & barbed wire. curlew & memento mori. lapwing & gorse in flower. moon 2 days from full.

& light poured out early, the year holed & sinking – candle lit in the window by 4

@nicolawriting.bsky.social - really enjoyed your Substack post from yesterday: great writing! - thank you

last day of the year (how light aches in its rise), settle of thin frost (stiffen of laundry on the line), scent of diesel as a tractor lumbers uphill, birds on the feeder before you turn your back from filling it

30 december & frost lies gone noon & low sun scripts shadows of trees fields are empty the sheep driven off yesterday as transfer of ownership comes quietly nearer that arbitrary date when everything & nothing will shift

nightwalk with squalling tawnies flatcalm the bare trees method-act wind contact contrail-moon-branch

& pause to take stock, fresh vantage & slow constancy

& end of the sky's ebb-tide from the back step of the next step: 10 car loads (mostly books...), onwards towards a new year

& lines of stately fieldfares work their way downhill; beyond their clucking all is quiet (the pool in the woods holds nothing but inverted sky) - teasel heads harbour still ladybirds, a Londonbound easyjet clips the moon & goes on

& flat calm, silence until you send up five mallards to rouge in sunset; two pinkfooted geese pace & twist their necks to watch you go