Snow Falling on Ice Fog

The forest sits, placidly frozen
white and silent, under the
equally placid sky, so low a
ceiling hovering over the winter
landscape that its pewter presence
seems to muffle all sound enveloping
trees and bare outstretched
limbs in a soft cloud of white.

The silence is broken with the
near-distant clatter of crows,
assembling then rising to float
above the darkly stretched canopy
of leafless tree steeples and bright
evergreens. Soon the mist rising
from a half-frozen watercourse
twisting along a ravine bottom, is
heavily dusted by another cloud.

The release of gently spiralling
snow clusters, the wind stirring
the descending clumped crystals
to a porridge of white-out conditions,
and the landscape vanishes within its
colourless density, ambient sound
abandoned to dense serenity.