It is early morning, and the sun casts a honey-gold spill across the yard, reaching into every hollow where night still lingers. Behind it, the brooding pewter sky retreats—its dark mantle lifting. The widewaters are skinned over now with ice, a smooth and unscarred fleece that gathers yard, shore, and distant drumlands into an uninterrupted scene.

The locust and shag maple stand sentinel, their bare arms flung against this white expanse, sketching shadow-art across the canvas. High in the sycamore—with its bleached bones gleaming against the pale light—four crows sit pillow-fluffed against the cold. They hold their silence, as if the early air preserves some ancient agreement to speak only after the world has taken its first breath.

My own breath catches—not from the shock of cold invading my lungs, but from the ache of untarnished beauty. I touch the edges of that ache, try to name its place—heart… soul… perhaps both—and the naming still eludes me. Why does beauty carry pain in its wings? Somehow I know this is how God speaks to the poet: through moments so whole they defy our words, through awe that spills over the edges of language.

Already the sky is shifting to the palest wash of blue, a blue as if God Himself had taken His brush, dipped not in robin’s egg or heron pewter, but in a bowl of watercolor—barely a tint and yet undeniably blue.

My steps press into the silence, and the snow beneath me answers in its own strange language—each footfall giving a small, dry cry, like silk being torn very far away. By the time I reach the end of the drive, that watercolor sky has settled into fullness, the sun now shimmering into a brilliance so clean and fierce it lays silver threads down the road, turning pavement into a ribbon tossed from some unseen hand.

Across the way, the neighbor boy—anchored by the weight of his schoolbook backpack—leans to fill his mitten, thick-knitted, and lifts the scoop to his lips. I watch the way he closes his eyes to taste the day, the snow crystals dissolving into something bright and unbroken in his mouth.

I think of the words from Isaiah 55, how the snow falls from heaven and does not return without watering the earth, without accomplishing the purpose for which it was sent. Perhaps beauty is like that—sent on divine errand, quickening even the stubborn places in us, asking only that we pause long enough to taste it before the wind carries it on.

The boy swallows, and the moment blurs into motion again. Down the silver ribbon, a school bus growls nearer. Above the sycamore, the crows finally speak, voices like black feathers tossed into the air—and morning holds together, gold to silver, silence to sound, until the day has fully begun.