The moment day dawns

We were out early this morning, the small dog and I and back before the dawn again. Sitting with a coffee and trying to make sense of the madness that is my inbox every day I noticed the light change colour. I picked up the camera automatically as I turned to the window to be greeted with the most unbelievable colour as the rising sun lit the underside of the clouds. The sky looked like billowing silk or some tenuous dreamscape.

The light was changing every second. There was no time to get to the fields, so I ran upstairs, watching through the open window as the world woke. The keening of a kite drew my gaze towards a little copse of trees at the edge of the fields and I watched as the great bird sailed in. It seemed to fly backwards, as if time itself had been stopped and rewound. I have never seen them fly like that before. And then it saw its prey and plummeted to earth, taking the life of whatever small creature it had found.

I watched it rise against the pink sky, holding its prize in the great talons… seeming to lift its feet towards its beak. So fascinated was I by this spectacle I almost failed to see the shifting colours of the sky as the sun continued its inexorable ascent. Yet the kite wheeled towards the east and disappeared into the sudden blaze of a  golden inferno.

You could have missed it, so quickly did it come and go. For no more than a heartbeat the heavens were on fire. I stood, open mouthed, beneath this canopy of flame, watching as it blazed in mute glory and died. I thought in those brief seconds of how our lives must look… the merest flicker of light… a fleeting thought in the cosmic mind.

Yet when the flames had died, almost as if they had never been, the shade of beauty remained; softer… a pastel symphony of colour remained, smudged across the heavens like memory… an echo of something too incredible to encompass yet impossible to ignore as a new day was born above a sleeping world.