SUNFALL

 

 

 

 

By the ocean or in the countryside,

When I watch my thin shadow lengthening
Over the cooling beach or field or park,
I yearn for the spectacle of sunset
But, all too often, it hides its last light
Under the city’s towering clutter,
Whilst the dusk silently draws around me
Night’s cold, dreary shroud of darkness and death.
Thus, I can never truly love the dusk;
Only the beauty of its lexicon:
The penumbral fade of light to darkness,
By way of eventide - or the gloaming,
Or twilight - as the nocturne’s minor chords
Whisperingly process into nightfall.

(C. IGR 2013)

After a fallow period of about six months without a poem, this came fading in over an hour or so like a welcome dawn. I didn’t realise that it would be a blank verse sonnet until all the lines had appeared in order, only needing the slightest tweaking. Such is the way it goes: you wait half an hour for a bus etc.

I was trying to think of a title when ‘sunfall’ suddenly occurred to me. Having never come across it before, I wondered if I’d coined a new word. Thirty seconds later, following an investigation via a well-known search engine, I realised I hadn’t. A case of nothing new under the sun, then...

The picture was taken one evening in Corralejo town in Fuerteventuera last summer.