Prodded myself to go for a walk last night (early evening, twilight, gloaming, dusk …) and was rewarded by a glorious over-reaching sunset that bloomed above me as I walked Bayfield Park, alongside the inlet. It was spotted by many others with many pics on social media – including one from my daughter from a supermarket’s car park.

The thing was, in the time that I had my back to the harbour, heading east, I didn’t know the sunset was happening behind me until I turned round and – woah!

For such splendour to be completely silent, is perhaps the sky’s greatest power.

Listening: To Bluegrass on Spotify.

Which reminds me of a poem I wrote many years ago while listening to Gillian Welch:

so green it’s blue

This music I listen to is homesick
for a bayou. It is a foreign accent
in a suburb gurgling with lawnmowers
performing breaststroke
through oceans of grass; swirling
with the catfight-maul of electric saws.
It is music that picks and pines
and talks of grass so green it’s blue.
This plucked banjo
I listen to in my home far
from any Virginian heart breaker,
piano pedal pusher, is so agile
it trips the light
like a highland dancer
the Sword Dance, pointing toes
over invisible steel ropes that
twang, even in the rain, with the sweetness
of a guitar bleeding blue, it reaches
through to stop the heart in its train tracks,
here in this small city of mine, fastened
to fast-cooled volcanic remains, built to last
upon the crust of hardened magma.

Kay McKenzie Cooke