Crimson Sky Quotes

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.

Perhaps ... To R.A.L. Perhaps some day the sun will shine again, And I shall see that still the skies are blue, And feel one more I do not live in vain, Although bereft of you. Perhaps the golden meadows at my feet, Will make the sunny hours of spring seem gay, And I shall find the white May-blossoms sweet, Though You have passed away. Perhaps the summer woods will shimmer bright, And crimson roses once again be fair, And autumn harvest fields a rich delight, Although You are not there. But though kind Time may many joys renew, There is one greatest joy I shall not know Again, because my heart for loss of You Was broken, long ago.

Night, which in Autumn seems to fall from the sky so suddenly, chilled us...

November--with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes--days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees. What cared they? Old Tom had built his roof well, and his chimney drew.

And the marvellous rose became crimson, like the rose of the eastern sky. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as a ruby was the heart

The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face.

Once he went into the mountains on a clear, sunny day, and wandered about for a long time with a tormenting thought that refused to take shape. Before him was the shining sky, below him the lake, around him the horizon, bright and infinite, as if it went on forever. For a long time he looked and suffered. He remembered now how he had stretched out his arms to that bright, infinite blue and wept. What had tormented him was that he was a total stranger to it all. What was this banquet, what was this great everlasting feast, to which he had long been drawn, always, ever since childhood, and which he could never join? Every morning the same bright sun rises; every morning there is a rainbow over the waterfall; every evening the highest snowcapped mountain, there, far away, at the edge of the sky, burns with a crimson flame; every little fly that buzzes near him in a hot ray of sunlight participates in this whole chorus: knows its place, loves it, and is happy; every little blade of grass grows and is happy! And everything has its path, and everything knows its path, goes with a song and comes back with a song; only he knows nothing, understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway.

The shadow had followed behind them, clinging to their steps; and the two children little suspected its presence when they at last sat down, trustingly, under the mighty protection of Apollo, who, with a great bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the heart of a crimson sky.

Now at this hour, when the cirrus clouds stretched like crimson ribbons high across the southwest sky, in such a hush that not even a playful eddy dared stir moss or palm fronds, the day died in calm and in beauty.

It was a gracious evening, full of delectable lights and shadows. In the west was a sky of mackerel clouds-crimson and amber-tinted, with long strips of apple-green sky between. Beyond was the glimmering radiance of a sunset sea, and the ceaseless voice of many waters came up from the tawny shore.

The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dancer.

It was dusk, on a Friday. The battered skeletons of trees tapered against the fresh starlight in No Man's Land. The sky offered curious glimpses of beauty, from time to time. The men wrote about it in their letters, describing sunsets in painstaking detail to their families, as if there was nothing to see at the front but crimson clouds and dusted rays of golden light.

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire. That day in Moscow, it will all come true, when, for the last time, I take my leave, And hasten to the heights that I have longed for, Leaving my shadow still to be with you.

Tonight the sky is the color of my heart, bleeding crimson for my love

Sunset encroached upon daylight like a powder burst from the mouth of a crimson cannon—orange and gold ribbons shot forth to wage a battle against the clouds. The western horizon was obscured by a glow like a living thing.

Loneliness isn't gray. It is the color of the sky when it bleeds crimson rays in the horizon while there you are standing on the edge somewhere in this boulevard of broken promises, waiting, and waiting for a love that already left.

Bastian had climbed a dune of purplish-red sand and all around him he saw nothing but hill after hill of every imaginable color. Each hill revealed a shade or tint that occured in no other. The nearest was cobalt blue, another was saffron yellow, then came crimson red, then indigo, apple green, sky blue, orange, peach, mauve, turquoise blue, lilac, moss green, ruby red, burnt umber, Indian yellow, vermillion, lapis lazuli, and so on from horizon to horizon. And between the hill, separating color from color, flowed streams of gold and silver sand.

London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract.

There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.

They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark little archipelagos of cloud and the vast world of sand and scrub shearing upward into the shoreless void where those blue islands trembled and the earth grew uncertain, gravely canted and veering out through tinctures of rose and the dark beyond the dawn to the uttermost rebate of space.

There were so many miracles at work: that a blossom might become a peach, that a bee could make honey in its thorax, that rain might someday fall. I thought then about the seasons changing, and in the gray of night I could almost will myself to see the azure sky, the gold of the maple leaves, the crimson of the ripe apples, the hoarfrost on the grass.

Suddenly I saw a clearing in the dark drive ahead, and a patch of sky, and in a moment the dark trees had thinned, the nameless shrubs had disappeared, and on either side of us was a wall of colour, blood-red, reaching far above our heads. We were amongst the rhododendrons. There was something bewildering, even shocking, about the suddenness of their discovery. The woods had not prepared me for them. They startled me with their crimson faces, massed one upon the other in incredible profusion, showing no leaf, no twig, nothing but the slaughterous red, luscious and fantastic, unlike any rhododendron plant I had seen before. I glanced at Maxim. He was smiling. 'Like them?' he said. I told him 'Yes,' a little breathlessly, uncertain whether I was speaking the truth or not, for to me a rhododendron was a homely, domestic thing, strictly conventional, mauve or pink in colour, standing one beside the other in a neat round bed. And these were monsters, rearing to the sky, massed like a battalion, too beautiful I thought, too powerful; they were not plants at all.

The great hall was shimmering in light, sun streaming from the open windows, and ablaze with colour, the walls decorated with embroidered hangings in rich shades of gold and crimson. New rushes had been strewn about, fragrant with lavender, sweet woodruff, and balm... the air was... perfumed with honeysuckle and violet, their seductive scents luring in from the gardens butterflies as blue as the summer sky.

Let's offer flowers, pour a cup of libation, split open the skies and start anew on creation. If the forces of grief invade our lovers' veins, cupbearer and I will wash away this temptation. With rose water we'll mellow crimson wine's bitter cup; we'll sugar the fire to sweeten smoke's emanation. Take this fine lyre, musician, strike up a love song; let's dance, sing all night, go wild in celebration. As dust, 0 West Wind, let us rise to the Heavens, floating free in Creator's glow of elation. If mind desires to return while heart cries to stay, here's a quarrel for love's deliberation. Alas, these words and songs go for naught in this land; come, Hafez, let's create a new generation.

Even so long after sunset, the sky in the west was touched with feather-strokes of crimson and black. The wind was blowing from the east, which meant that even in the middle of the city you could breathe in desert: sand and grit, cactus and coyotes, the burning scent of sage.

October—with a gorgeous pageant of color around Mistawis into which Valancy plunged her soul. Never had she imagined anything so splendid. A great, tinted peace. Blue, wind-winnowed skies. Sunlight sleeping in the glades of that fairyland. Long dreamy purple days paddling idly in their canoe along shores and up the rivers of crimson and gold. A sleepy, red hunter’s moon. Enchanted tempests that stripped the leaves from the trees and heaped them along the shores. Flying shadows of clouds. What had all the smug, opulent lands out front to compare with this?

She sighed. “I wish I had their faith. Crimson is a Lannister color.” “That thing’s not crimson,” Ser Brynden said. “Nor Tully red, the mud red of the river. That’s blood up there, child, smeared across the sky.” “Our blood or theirs?” “Was there ever a war where only one side bled?

And somewhere in that crimson-colored never-never land where i pirouetted madly, in a wild and crazy effort to exhaust myself into insensibility, i saw that man, shadowy and distant, half-hidden behind towering white columns that rose clear up to a purple sky. In a passionate pas de deux he danced with me, forever apart, no matter how hard i sought to draw nearer and leap into his arms, where i could feel them protective about me, supporting me ... and with him i'd find, at last, a safe place to live and love.

Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy; she can’t speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains, the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of space — none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple of minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that cases I think I could enjoy looking at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a quite remarkably comely creature — lithe, slender, trim, rounded, shapely, nimble, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was beautiful.

So if big enough droplets fell far enough fast enough, someone floating right near the metallic hydrogen layer inside Jupiter maybe, just maybe, could have looked up into its cream and orange sky and seen the most spectacular show ever--fireworks lighting up the Jovian night with a trillion streaks of brilliant crimson, what scientists call neon rain.

Daughter of Azura. Daughter of Miina. Hear these truths. The moon cannot enslave the sun, nor make the day its mistress. Or victory shall spell defeat, a crimson sky its auspice. The sun and moon must shine as one, or all will be undone.

The sky darkens from ultramarine to indigo. God bless the namers of oil paints and high-class women’s underwear, Snowman thinks. Rose-Petal Pink, Crimson Lake, Sheer Mist, Burnt Umber, Ripe Plum, Indigo, Ultramarine – they’re fantasies in themselves, such words and phrases. It’s comforting to remember that Homo sapiens sapiens was once so ingenious with language, and not only with language. Ingenious in every direction at once.

London was beginning to illuminate herself against the night. Electric lights sizzled and jagged in the main thoroughfares, gas-lamps in the side streets glimmered a canary gold or green. The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. She has never known the clear-cut armies of the purer air. Leonard hurried through her tinted wonders, very much part of the picture. His was a grey life, and to brighten it he had ruled off a few corners for romance.

But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood.

If we lose our clocks and watches, the crimson sky of twilight will remind us of the time of dusk, and the phases of the moon will never fail to be our monthly adviser.

He sat with his back to a rock and felt the warmth of the sun on his face and watched it pool and flare and drain away dragging with it all that pink and rose and crimson sky.

What need for feathers now? What need to confirm their loss? While the womb-red sky swelled with the promise of tomorrow, and he rode the warm, crimson currents, skimming, wheeling and gliding.

...to her, all familiar responses smell of entrapment. Sharing an old joke, singing an old song - these are admissions of defeat, of being satisfied with one's lot. In the sky, the Fates are watching, and when they hear such things, they murmur amongst themselves: Ah yes, that one is quite content as she is; changing her lot would only confuse her.

The shadow had followed behind them, clinging to their steps; and the two children little suspected its presence when they at last sat down, trustingly, under the mighty protection of Apollo, who, with a great bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the heart of a crimson sky. It was a gorgeous spring evening. Clouds, which had just received their gossamer robe of gold and purple from the setting sun, drifted slowly by;

ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

The dawn came - not the flaming sky that promises storm, but a golden dawn of infinite promise. The birds came flying up out of the east in wedge-shaped formation, and the mist lifted in soft wreaths of sun-shot silver. Colour came back to the world. The grass glowed with a green so vivid that it seemed pulsing, like flame, from some hidden fire in the earth, the distant woods took on all the amazing deep crimsons and purples of their winter colouring, the banks were studded with their jewels of lichens and bright moss, and above the wet hedges shone with sun-shot orbs of light.

The land is thirsty. People are thirsty. But only blood will bring back the rain.

Loneliness isn't just sad and blue; it cloaks itself in the sky's crimson rays on the horizon and the fleeting warmth of a winter fire. It holds me on the edge of this empty space, where I wait endlessly for a dream that has already departed.

What would happen if you couldn’t forget, if every emotion from every person whose grief you’d eaten came back up? It could happen if something went wrong with the formula millions and millions of permutations down the line. A thousand falling men landing on you. Nneoma tried to retreat, to close her eyes and unsee, but she couldn’t. Instinct took over and she raced to calculate it all. The breadth of it was so vast, too vast. It was just her and Kioni together, their burden excessive, even for two. The last clear thought she would ever have was of her father, how crimson his burden had been when she’d tried to shoulder it, and how very pale it all seemed now.

The Aurora!" Her wonder was so strong that she had to clutch the rail to keep from falling. The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if from Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung and shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skillful dancer. Lyra thought she could even hear them: a vast distant whispering swish. In the evanescent delicacy she felt something as profound as she'd felt close to the bear. She was moved by it: it was so beautiful it was almost holy; she felt tears prick her eyes, and the tears splintered the light even further into prismatic rainbows.

It is like a beautiful sunset you see once in your life, one you swear you will never forget as long as you live. And you never do forget, but you never have a reason to restore the memory—so it remains hidden inside. Until one day, for no apparent reason, you remember that sunset. You recall the way your skin felt as the sun brushed across it, the way the colors painted the sky. You wonder why it took you so long to go back to that place again, swearing you won't take so long next time. Only you do forget the memory and you may or may not ever relive it again.

James Heron dreamed he was once more in the abandoned tunnels on Mars. As he walked, the barren rocky landscape transformed into hills of tangled vegetation. Lightning played in tall cumulus clouds in a darkening sky, and the sky was definitely an Earth sky, not a Martian one. He seemed to have companions, but their clothing was strange—very old fashioned, in fact, as if they belonged in the nineteenth century. He didn’t recognise the landscape, but it seemed to be on Earth, and the group, several youths and a few older men, appeared to be suffering from the heat, plucking their shirts which displayed damp patches of perspiration. A short distance ahead of him walked a heavily built man who evidently was not enjoying the walk in the heat, his face flushed crimson and perspiring profusely. The sky darkened and large drops of rain pelted the group, and they increased their pace. His view changed slightly as someone behind him called something he could not quite hear. The lightning seemed to be getting closer, and he and a companion—a youth, he noted ran for cover. He could smell the rain on the wet earth, and the fragrance of the vegetation intensified. He could feel the tension of the group—their fear perhaps? Suddenly there was a blinding flash that seemed to engulf him—and then he jolted awake bathed in perspiration.

Boxes of fireworks - she remembered them filling her childhood, at every occasion she could think of, gods, where had the Popisho fireworks gone? Mad swirls of silver-blue lightning and crimson stars. A whole sky of melting yellow moons that trickled into their hair and faces and turned into caramel.

But clouds bellied out in the sultry heat, the sky cracked open with a crimson gash, spewed flame-and the ancient forest began to smoke. By morning there was a mass of booming, fiery tongues, a hissing, crashing, howling all around, half the sky black with smoke, and the bloodied sun just barely visible. And what can little men do with their spades, ditches, and pails? The forest is no more, it was devoured by fire: stumps and ash. Perhaps illimitable fields will be plowed here one day, perhaps some new, unheard-of wheat will ripen here and men from Arkansas with shaven faces will weigh in their palms the heavy golden grain. Or perhaps a city will grow up-alive with ringing sound and motion, all stone and crystal and iron-and winged men will come here flying over seas and mountains from all ends of the world. But never again the forest, never again the blue winter silence and the golden silence of summer. And only the tellers of tales will speak in many-colored patterned words about what had been, about wolves and bears and stately green-coated century-old grandfathers, about old Russia; they will speak about all this to us who have seen it with our own eyes ten years - a hundred years! - ago, and to those others, the winged ones, who will come in a hundred years to listen and to marvel at it all as at a fairy tale. ("In Old Russia")

You must know, my loved one, that there are beings in the elements which almost appear like mortals, and which rarely allow themselves to become visible to your race. Wonderful salamanders glitter and sport in the flames; lean and malicious gnomes dwell deep within the earth; spirits, belonging to the air, wander through the forests; and a vast family of water spirits live in the lakes and streams and brooks. In resounding domes of crystal, through which the sky looks in with its sun and stars, these latter spirits find their beautiful abode; lofty trees of coral with blue and crimson fruits gleam in their gardens; they wander over the pure sand of the sea, and among lovely variegated shells, and amid all exquisite treasures of the old world, which the present is no longer worthy to enjoy; all these the floods have covered with their secret veils of silver, and the noble monuments sparkle below, stately and solemn, and bedewed by the loving waters which allure from them many a beautiful moss-flower and entwining cluster of sea grass. Those, however, who dwell there, are very fair and lovely to behold, and for the most part, are more beautiful than human beings. Many a fisherman has been so fortunate as to surprise some tender mermaid, as she rose above the waters and sang. He would then tell afar of her beauty, and such wonderful beings have been given the name of Undines. You, however, are now actually beholding an Undine.

Oregon October, when the fields of timothy and rye-grass stubble are being burned, the sky itself catches fire. Flocks of wrens rush up from the red alder thickets like sparks kicked from a campfire, the salmon jumps again, and the river rolls molten and slow . . . Down river, from Andy’s Landing, a burned-off cedar snag held the sun spitted like an apple, hissing and dripping juices against a grill of Indian Summer clouds. All the hillside, all the drying Himalaya vine that lined the big river, and the sugar-maple trees farther up, burned a dark brick and over-lit red. The river split for the jump of a red-gilled silver salmon, then circled to mark the spot where it fell. Spoonbills shoveled at the crimson mud in the shallows, and dowitchers jumped from cattail to cattail, frantically crying “Kleek! Kleek!” as though the thin reeds were as hot as the pokers they resembled. Canvasback and brant flew south in small, fiery, faraway flocks. And in the shabby ruin of broken cornfields rooster ringnecks clashed together in battle so bright, so gleaming polished-copper bright, that the fields seemed to ring with their fighting. This is Hank’s bell.

It is true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forests, have loved women ... Beauties as ethereal as clouds, created by the magic of your poets and geniuses, have visited me at night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl. In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elburz and Mont Blanc, and from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky, the ocean, and the mountain-tops with gold and crimson. I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm-clouds. I have seen green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the strains of the shepherds' pipes; I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God ... In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms ...

Yet knowing the physics steals none of the wonder as the sky turns from blue to crimson, then deep purple, and finally embraces the black of night as Earth’s rotation

Above him was a clear blue sky, and the sun's vast orb quivered like a huge hollow, crimson float on the surface of that milky sea of mist.

the first archer lets his arrow fly, soaring over the crowd and hitting it's mark in a shower of sparks. The bonfire ignites in an eruption of yellow flame. Then second chime follows. the second archer sends his arrow into the yellow flames, and they become a clear sky-blue. A third chime with a third arrow. and the flames are a warm bright pink. Flames the color of a ripe pumpkin follow the fourth arrow. A fifth, and the flames are scarlet-red. A sixth brings a deeper, sparkling crimson. Seven, and the fire is soaked in a color like an incandescent wine. Eight, and the flames are shimmering violet. Nine, and violet shift to indigo. A tenth chime, a tenth arrow, and the bonfire turns deepest midnight blue.

At the water's edge, barrels of pitch blazed like huge bonfires. Their reflection, crimson as the rising moon, crept to meet us in long, wide stripes. The burning barrels threw light on their own smoke and on the long human shadows that flitted about the fire; but further to the sides and behind them, where the velvet ringing rushed from, was the same impenetrable darkness. Suddenly slashing it open, the golden ribbon of a rocket soared skywards; it described an arc and, as if shattering against the sky, burst and came sifting down in sparks. - Easter Night

The night was red, bathed in a mist unholy light. The moon - that crimson orb gazing down like the giant blind eye of a moonsick soul - filled half the sky as it rose above the eastern horizon.

At ten seconds before the hour, they raise their bows and aim the flaming arrows at the waiting well of curling iron. As the clock begins to chime near the gates, the first archer lets his arrow fly, soaring over the crowd and hitting its mark in a shower of sparks. The bonfire ignites in an eruption of yellow flame. Then the second chime follows, the second archer sends his arrow into the yellow flames, and they become a clear sky-blue. A third chime with a third arrow, and the flames are a warm bright pink. Flames the color of a ripe pumpkin follow the fourth arrow. A fifth, and the flames are scarlet-red. A sixth brings a deeper, sparkling crimson. Seven, and the fire is soaked in a color like incandescent wine. Eight, and the flames are shimmering violet. Nine, and the violet shifts to indigo. A tenth chime, a tenth arrow, and the bonfire turns deepest midnight blue. On the penultimate chime, the dancing flames change from blue to black, and for a moment, it is difficult to discount the fire from its cauldron. And on the final strike, the dark flames are replaced with a blinding white, a shower of sparks falling like snowflakes around it. Huge curls of dense white smoke swirl up into the night sky.

What if you lose your muse? Your mind will keep searching for an unknown palm, an empty core of clustered starry moisture, a broken harmony of a long lost song. Your heart will trample across moments, scattered here and there hoping to smile through a blank verse, an unmade sculpture, a void cosmos walking through a violet sky. And your soul? That, a sparkle of a crimson sun will dance along the glitter of a fragmentary dream, and in a love that clutches you in transience of an eternity, hold your breath in a paradise of a vibrant vision, and there you will find your muse again, once again. So what if you lose your muse?

To say that the frozen silence contracted itself into a yet higher globe of ice were to under-rate the exquisite tension and to shroud it in words. The atmosphere had become a physical sensation. As when, before a masterpiece, the acid throat contracts, and words are millstones, so when the supernaturally outlandish happens and a masterpiece is launched through the medium of human gesture, then all human volition is withered at the source and the heart of action stops beating. Such a moment was this. Irma, a stalagmite of crimson stone, knew, for all the riot of her veins that a page had turned over. At chapter forty? O no! At chapter one, for she had never lived before save in a pulseless preface. How long did they remain thus? How many times had the earth moved round the sun? How many times had the great blue whales of the northern waters risen to spurt their fountains at the sky? How many reed-bucks had fallen to the claws of how many leopards, while that sublime unit of two-figure statuary remained motionless? It is fruitless to ask. The clocks of the world stood still or should have done.

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire. That day in Moscow, it will all come true, when, for the last time, I take my leave, And hasten to the heights that I have longed for, Leaving my shadow still to be with you.

Seal with a seal of gold The scroll of a life unrolled; Swathe him deep in his purple stole; Ashes of diamonds, crystalled coal, Drops of gold in each scented fold. Crimson wings of the Little Death, Stir his hair with your silken breath; Flaming wings of sins to be, Splendid pinions of prophecy, Smother his eyes with hues and dyes, While the white moon spins and the winds arise, And the stars drip through the skies. Wave, O wings of the Little Death! Seal his sight and stifle his breath, Cover his breast with the gemmed shroud pressed; From north to north, from west to west, Wave, O wings of the Little Death! Till the white moon reels in the cracking skies, And the ghosts of God arise.

It wasn't gloom at all, really. There were lights and colors. If it hadn't been for the feel of the water gliding by against his skin he might have imagined himself up in the sky, with meteors and comets blazing past. But these were sea-things, shining in the dark, the luminous life that blazes beneath the southern sea. First he'd see a tiny twinkling speck, like a star, and it might have been next to his face or a mile away, in that immense, featureless void, with its faint hint of green. It would grow larger. It would turn into a radiant sun of purple or crimson or orange and come rushing at him, and swerve aside at the last moment. There were sinuous ribbons of fire that coiled into bright patterns, and there were schools of tiny fish that flashed by like sparks. Down below, in the deeper abyss, the colors were paler, and once an enormous shape blundered past down there, like the sea-bottom itself moving heavily. Pete watched awhile and then swam up. ("Before I Wake...")

Mother Earth, she weeps in shadows, Her heart is drenched in rue, Her forests burn in crimson flames, Her skies no longer blue. She bears the scars of time and greed, Her oceans filled with tears, Her silent scream echoes, Throughout her dying years.

GO to the western gate, Luke Havergal,— There where the vines cling crimson on the wall,— And in the twilight wait for what will come. The wind will moan, the leaves will whisper some,— Whisper of her, and strike you as they fall; But go, and if you trust her she will call. Go to the western gate, Luke Havergal— Luke Havergal. No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies To rift the fiery night that ’s in your eyes; But there, where western glooms are gathering, The dark will end the dark, if anything: God slays Himself with every leaf that flies, And hell is more than half of paradise. No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies— In eastern skies. Out of a grave I come to tell you this,— Out of grave I come to quench the kiss That flames upon your forehead with a glow That blinds you to the way that you must go. Yes, there is yet one way to where she is,— Bitter, but one that faith can never miss. Out of a grave I come to tell you this— To tell you this. There is the western gate, Luke Havergal, There are the crimson leaves upon the wall. Go,—for the winds are tearing them away,— Nor think to riddle the dead words they say, Nor any more to feel them as they fall; But go! and if you trust her she will call. There is the western gate, Luke Havergal— Luke Havergal.

By the time they had called at the baker's and climbed to the top of Cap Diamant, the sun, dropping with incredible quickness, had already disappeared. They sat down in the blue twilight to eat their bread and await the turbid afterglow which is peculiar to Quebec in autumn; the slow, rich, prolonged flowing-back of crimson across the sky, after the sun has sunk behind the dark ridges of the west. Because of the haze in the air the colour seems thick, like a heavy liquid, welling up wave after wave, a substance that throbs, rather than a light.

It is tragic what people do just to be accepted. I once met an angel who cut off her wings and chose to walk whit all the petty humans. My heart laments for the world, because what a sight it would be to behold, watching her hazy silhouette gently flying into the crimson sunset skies.

It’s called “Caliban At Sunset”.’ ‘What at sunset?’ ‘Caliban.’ He cleared his throat, and began: I stood with a man Watching the sun go down. The air was full of murmurous summer scents And a brave breeze sang like a bugle From a sky that smouldered in the west, A sky of crimson, amethyst and gold and sepia And blue as blue as were the eyes of Helen When she sat Gazing from some high tower in Ilium Upon the Grecian tents darkling below. And he, This man who stood beside me, Gaped like some dull, half-witted animal And said, ‘I say, Doesn’t that sunset remind you Of a slice Of underdone roast beef?’ He

The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No colour at all, save for the neighbouring trees and grass of the surrounding fields. Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colourless world. Even what little ground is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick.

Ieronym took hold of the cable with both hands, curved himself into a question mark, and grunted. The ferry creaked and lurched. The silhouette of the peasant in the tall hat slowly began to recede from me--which meant that the ferry was moving. Soon Ieronym straightened up and began working with one hand. We were silent and looked at the bank towards which we were now moving. There the "lumination" which the peasant had been waiting for was already beginning. At the water's edge, barrels of pitch blazed like huge bonfires. Their reflection, crimson as the rising moon, crept to meet us in long, wide stripes. The burning barrels threw light on their own smoke and on the long human shadows that flitted about the fire; but further to the sides and behind them, where the velvet ringing rushed from, was the same impenetrable darkness. Suddenly slashing it open, the golden ribbon of a rocket soared skywards; it described an arc and, as if shattering against the sky, burst and came sifting down in sparks. On the bank a noise was heard resembling a distant "hoorah." "How beautiful," I said. "It's even impossible to say how beautiful!" sighed Ieronym. "It's that kind of night, sir! At other times you don't pay attention to rockets, but now any vain thing makes you glad. Where are you from?

I Saw His Round Mouth's Crimson" "I saw his round mouth's crimson deepen as it fell, Like a Sun, in his last deep hour; Watched the magnificent recession of farewell, Clouding, half gleam, half glower, And a last splendour burn the heavens of his cheek. And in his eyes The cold stars lighting, very old and bleak, In different skies.

A flush came into the sky, the wan moon, half-way down the west, sank into insignificance. On the shadowy land things began to take life, plants with great leaves became distinct. They came through a pass in the big, cold sandhills on to the beach. The long waste of foreshore lay moaning under the dawn and the sea; the ocean was a flat dark strip with a white edge. Over the gloomy sea the sky grew red. Quickly the fire spread among the clouds and scattered them. Crimson burned to orange, orange to dull gold, and in a golden glitter the sun came up, dribbling fierily over the waves in little splashes, as if someone had gone along and the light had spilled from her pail as she walked.

The lightning has ceased, leaving jagged scars among the starry patchwork of night.

Sometimes when the sky overwhelms the world with crimson, a man becomes the image of himself.

For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life. It is true I have not seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, I have sung songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forests, have loved women ... Beauties as ethereal as clouds, created by the magic of your poets and geniuses, have visited me at night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have set my brain in a whirl. In your books I have climbed to the peaks of Elburz and Mont Blanc, and from there I have seen the sun rise and have watched it at evening flood the sky, the ocean, and the mountain-tops with gold and crimson. I have watched from there the lightning flashing over my head and cleaving the storm-clouds. I have seen green forests, fields, rivers, lakes, towns. I have heard the singing of the sirens, and the strains of the shepherds' pipes; I have touched the wings of comely devils who flew down to converse with me of God ... In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit, performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered whole kingdoms ...

Don´t cry" Sirius coos, lips curling up as he leans in kisses under one eye. "your tears control the tides, you know." He kisses under the other eye. "Why don´t we have a calm ocean tonight? No shipwrecks. Nothing worse than a sunken ship" "But thats where all the treasures are" Remus teases, smiling along helplessly, and Sirius looks pleased instantly. "You´re a treasure, Remus Lupin" Sirius mumurs, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth. "My treasure, the treasure I found in this sunken ship of a city. You glinted in the dark like the moon lights in the sky, and I found you.

She went to the fence and sat there, watching the gold clouds fall to pieces, and go in immense, rose-coloured ruin towards the darkness. Gold flamed to scarlet, like pain in its intense brightness. Then the scarlet sank to rose, and rose to crimson, and quickly the passion went out of the sky. All the world was dark grey. Paul scrambled quickly down with his basket, tearing his shirt-sleeve as he did so.

J.K. watches a storm rage into the crimson afternoon. The sky is electric. Rain whips her bare arms and legs. Dustbins are hauled into the air, caught on the wind’s curve. Bags and pillowcase unpacked for a while, toothbrush, perfume, books, a little pile of yellow feathers, J.K. knows she too is caught in the wind. She is Europe’s eerie child, and she is part of the storm." (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy)

On this way, they reached the roof. Christine tripped over it as lightly as a swallow. Their eyes swept the empty space between the three domes and the triangular pediment. She breathed freely over Paris, the whole valley of which was seen at work below. She called Raoul to come quite close to her and they walked side by side along the zinc streets, in the leaden avenues; they looked at their twin shapes in the huge tanks, full of stagnant water, where, in the hot weather, the little boys of the ballet, a score or so, learn to swim and dive. The shadow had followed behind them clinging to their steps; and the two children little suspected its presence when they at last sat down, trustingly, under the mighty protection of Apollo, who, with a great bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the heart of a crimson sky. It was a gorgeous spring evening. Clouds, which had just received their gossamer robe of gold and purple from the setting sun, drifted slowly by; and Christine said to Raoul: “Soon we shall go farther and faster than the clouds, to the end of the world, and then you will leave me, Raoul. But, if, when the moment comes for you to take me away, I refuse to go with you—well you must carry me off by force!” “Are you afraid that you will change your mind, Christine?” “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head in an odd fashion. “He is a demon!” And she shivered and nestled in his arms with a moan. “I am afraid now of going back to live with him … in the ground!” “What compels you to go back, Christine?” “If I do not go back to him, terrible misfortunes may happen! … But I can’t do it, I can’t do it! … I know one ought to be sorry for people who live underground … But he is too horrible! And yet the time is at hand; I have only a day left; and, if I do not go, he will come and fetch me with his voice. And he will drag me with him, underground, and go on his knees before me, with his death’s head. And he will tell me that he loves me! And he will cry! Oh, those tears, Raoul, those tears in the two black eye-sockets of the death’s head! I can not see those tears flow again!” She wrung her hands in anguish, while Raoul pressed her to his heart. “No, no, you shall never again hear him tell you that he loves you! You shall not see his tears! Let us fly, Christine, let us fly at once!” And he tried to drag her away, then and there. But she stopped him. “No, no,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “Not now! … It would be too cruel … let him hear me sing to-morrow evening … and then we will go away. You must come and fetch me in my dressing-room at midnight exactly. He will then be waiting for me in the dining-room by the lake … we shall be free and you shall take me away … You must promise me that, Raoul, even if I refuse; for I feel that, if I go back this time, I shall perhaps never return.” And she gave a sigh to which it seemed to her that another sigh, behind her, replied. “Didn’t you hear?” Her teeth chattered. “No,” said Raoul, “I heard nothing.” - Chapter 12: Apollo’s Lyre

The sky is a virginal blue translucence as though bereft for a fleeting moment of the effects of both light and darkness. A crimson streak smoulders over the outline of the hills, a simmering bloodline. There is a solitary canoe on the water. A cold white sheen rises from the water. She holds her breath. As if to stop any more time from passing, to stop the future happening. The peacefulness of the morning is almost heartbreaking in its fragility.

It was just past sunset, and the sky was shifting rapidly from shades of burnt orange into a deep violet blue. The men sat in awed silence, as the world’s largest monolith glowed and shimmered a thousand indescribable shades of crimson.

I SEEK SOLACE IN THE CRIMSON SUNRISE, That splashes the east with beauty; I am captivated by the azure skies, Which follow with an air of serenity! I watch the color of the seas That paints the canvas of my heart; I brush my thoughts with the elegant breeze That translates my ideas to art! The dainty garden of beauteous flowers - Red, yellow, lilac and white - Toss and frolic in breezy hours Spreading the waves of lucid delight. The hills covered with foliage green, And the faded ones, blue and grey, Enthrall me as my eyes glean Their glimpses while I move away. Each speck of dust, each grain of rice, And the farms reflect life and mirth; Colors of nature, at ease, entice, Bringing the sweet scent of earth. I chase the mesmerizing butterflies Laden with hues of heaven, Solitude becomes a joyous exercise. When by beauty, I am madly driven! The world is filled with colors galore, Each day is a colorful festivity; Every moment you amass more and more, There is no end to beauty!

Never play the princess when you can be the queen: rule the kingdom, swing a scepter, wear a crown of gold. Don’t dance in glass slippers, crystal carving up your toes -- be a barefoot Amazon instead, for those shoes will surely shatter on your feet. Never wear only pink when you can strut in crimson red, sweat in heather grey, and shimmer in sky blue, claim the golden sun upon your hair. Colors are for everyone, boys and girls, men and women -- be a verdant garden, the landscape of Versailles, not a pale primrose blindly pushed aside. Chase green dragons and one-eyed zombies, fierce and fiery toothy monsters, not merely lazy butterflies, sweet and slow on summer days. For you can tame the most brutish beasts with your wily wits and charm, and lizard scales feel just as smooth as gossamer insect wings. Tramp muddy through the house in a purple tutu and cowboy boots. Have a tea party in your overalls. Build a fort of birch branches, a zoo of Legos, a rocketship of Queen Anne chairs and coverlets, first stop on the moon. Dream of dinosaurs and baby dolls, bold brontosaurus and bookish Belle, not Barbie on the runway or Disney damsels in distress -- you are much too strong to play the simpering waif. Don a baseball cap, dance with Daddy, paint your toenails, climb a cottonwood. Learn to speak with both your mind and heart. For the ground beneath will hold you, dear -- know that you are free. And never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.

The people cast themselves down by the fuming boards while servants cut the roast, mixed jars of wine and water, and all the gods flew past like the night-breaths of spring. The chattering female flocks sat down by farther tables, their fresh prismatic garments gleaming in the moon as though a crowd of haughty peacocks played in moonlight. The queen’s throne softly spread with white furs of fox gaped desolate and bare, for Penelope felt ashamed to come before her guests after so much murder. Though all the guests were ravenous, they still refrained, turning their eyes upon their silent watchful lord till he should spill wine in libation for the Immortals. The king then filled a brimming cup, stood up and raised it high till in the moon the embossed adornments gleamed: Athena, dwarfed and slender, wrought in purest gold, pursued around the cup with double-pointed spear dark lowering herds of angry gods and hairy demons; she smiled and the sad tenderness of her lean face, and her embittered fearless glance, seemed almost human. Star-eyed Odysseus raised Athena’s goblet high and greeted all, but spoke in a beclouded mood: “In all my wandering voyages and torturous strife, the earth, the seas, the winds fought me with frenzied rage; I was in danger often, both through joy and grief, of losing priceless goodness, man’s most worthy face. I raised my arms to the high heavens and cried for help, but on my head gods hurled their lightning bolts, and laughed. I then clasped Mother Earth, but she changed many shapes, and whether as earthquake, beast, or woman, rushed to eat me; then like a child I gave my hopes to the sea in trust, piled on my ship my stubbornness, my cares, my virtues, the poor remaining plunder of god-fighting man, and then set sail; but suddenly a wild storm burst, and when I raised my eyes, the sea was strewn with wreckage. As I swam on, alone between sea and sky, with but my crooked heart for dog and company, I heard my mind, upon the crumpling battlements about my head, yelling with flailing crimson spear. Earth, sea, and sky rushed backward; I remained alone with a horned bow slung down my shoulder, shorn of gods and hopes, a free man standing in the wilderness. Old comrades, O young men, my island’s newest sprouts, I drink not to the gods but to man’s dauntless mind.” All shuddered, for the daring toast seemed sacrilege, and suddenly the hungry people shrank in spirit; They did not fully understand the impious words but saw flames lick like red curls about his savage head. The smell of roast was overpowering, choice meats steamed, and his bold speech was soon forgotten in hunger’s pangs; all fell to eating ravenously till their brains reeled. Under his lowering eyebrows Odysseus watched them sharply: "This is my people, a mess of bellies and stinking breath! These are my own minds, hands, and thighs, my loins and necks!" He muttered in his thorny beard, held back his hunger far from the feast and licked none of the steaming food.

One Autumn night, in Sudbury town, Across the meadows bare and brown, The windows of the wayside inn Gleamed red with fire-light through the leaves Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves Their crimson curtains rent and thin.” “As ancient is this hostelry As any in the land may be, Built in the old Colonial day, When men lived in a grander way, With ampler hospitality; A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall, Now somewhat fallen to decay, With weather-stains upon the wall, And stairways worn, and crazy doors, And creaking and uneven floors, And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall. A region of repose it seems, A place of slumber and of dreams, Remote among the wooded hills! For there no noisy railway speeds, Its torch-race scattering smoke and gleeds; But noon and night, the panting teams Stop under the great oaks, that throw Tangles of light and shade below, On roofs and doors and window-sills. Across the road the barns display Their lines of stalls, their mows of hay, Through the wide doors the breezes blow, The wattled cocks strut to and fro, And, half effaced by rain and shine, The Red Horse prances on the sign. Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode Deep silence reigned, save when a gust Went rushing down the county road, And skeletons of leaves, and dust, A moment quickened by its breath, Shuddered and danced their dance of death, And through the ancient oaks o'erhead Mysterious voices moaned and fled. These are the tales those merry guests Told to each other, well or ill; Like summer birds that lift their crests Above the borders of their nests And twitter, and again are still. These are the tales, or new or old, In idle moments idly told; Flowers of the field with petals thin, Lilies that neither toil nor spin, And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse Hung in the parlor of the inn Beneath the sign of the Red Horse. Uprose the sun; and every guest, Uprisen, was soon equipped and dressed For journeying home and city-ward; The old stage-coach was at the door, With horses harnessed, long before The sunshine reached the withered sward Beneath the oaks, whose branches hoar Murmured: "Farewell forevermore. Where are they now? What lands and skies Paint pictures in their friendly eyes? What hope deludes, what promise cheers, What pleasant voices fill their ears? Two are beyond the salt sea waves, And three already in their graves. Perchance the living still may look Into the pages of this book, And see the days of long ago Floating and fleeting to and fro, As in the well-remembered brook They saw the inverted landscape gleam, And their own faces like a dream Look up upon them from below.

The desert at night was black and a strange madder-tinted silver; the sky was black, and the great contorted cliffs, and the vast expanses of sand that stretched out in all directions. But the red moon cast a pale crimson-tinged luminescence over everything, and far above the stars were glittering points of silver.

One Autumn night, in Sudbury town, Across the meadows bare and brown, The windows of the wayside inn Gleamed red with fire-light through the leaves Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves Their crimson curtains rent and thin. As ancient is this hostelry As any in the land may be, Built in the old Colonial day, When men lived in a grander way, With ampler hospitality; A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall, Now somewhat fallen to decay, With weather-stains upon the wall, And stairways worn, and crazy doors, And creaking and uneven floors, And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall. A region of repose it seems, A place of slumber and of dreams, Remote among the wooded hills! For there no noisy railway speeds, Its torch-race scattering smoke and gleeds; But noon and night, the panting teams Stop under the great oaks, that throw Tangles of light and shade below, On roofs and doors and window-sills. Across the road the barns display Their lines of stalls, their mows of hay, Through the wide doors the breezes blow, The wattled cocks strut to and fro, And, half effaced by rain and shine, The Red Horse prances on the sign. Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode Deep silence reigned, save when a gust Went rushing down the county road, And skeletons of leaves, and dust, A moment quickened by its breath, Shuddered and danced their dance of death, And through the ancient oaks o'erhead Mysterious voices moaned and fled. These are the tales those merry guests Told to each other, well or ill; Like summer birds that lift their crests Above the borders of their nests And twitter, and again are still. These are the tales, or new or old, In idle moments idly told; Flowers of the field with petals thin, Lilies that neither toil nor spin, And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse Hung in the parlor of the inn Beneath the sign of the Red Horse. Uprose the sun; and every guest, Uprisen, was soon equipped and dressed For journeying home and city-ward; The old stage-coach was at the door, With horses harnessed,long before The sunshine reached the withered sward Beneath the oaks, whose branches hoar Murmured: "Farewell forevermore. Where are they now? What lands and skies Paint pictures in their friendly eyes? What hope deludes, what promise cheers, What pleasant voices fill their ears? Two are beyond the salt sea waves, And three already in their graves. Perchance the living still may look Into the pages of this book, And see the days of long ago Floating and fleeting to and fro, As in the well-remembered brook They saw the inverted landscape gleam, And their own faces like a dream Look up upon them from below.

Finally, I have come to realise that an imperfect Life is actually the most perfect Life. I have come to see how Life is beautiful in all its colours, more so because the shades of grey bind them and paint them with even more radiance. A clear sky is always beautiful but what if we never have rain or storm? Sunshine is always wonderful but what if we never have the soothing dusk or the cold night to coil in our own misty self? Storms that come to jolt us often leave us with more courage as we sail along the gust to chase a silver lining. The scorching heat that chokes us often makes us wait more eagerly for that balm of rain. So is Life, in all those moments of sunset we have the hope of the following sunrise, and if we may wait and absorb all that crumbling ray of that sunset we would be able to paint our sunrise with even more crimson smile. Because just like a story, nothing in Life is really concrete without patience. We cannot skip pages of a book because each line contains just so much to seep in, and to have the story fully lived inside our heart and soul we have to keep reading until the very end to feel that sense of peaceful happiness, that always clutches us no matter how the ending is drafted. In the same manner, we have to keep walking through Life, as each and every step of ours leads us to the destination of our Life, the destination of peace, the destination of knowledge of self. The best part of this walk is that it is never a straight line, but is always filled with curves and turns, making us aware of our spirit, laughing loud at times while mourning deep at times. But that is what Life is all about, a bunch of imperfect moments to smile as perfect memories sailing through the potholes of Life, because a straight line even in the world of science means death, after all monotony of perfection is the most cold imperfection. So as we walk through difficult times, may we realise that this sunset is not forever's and that the winter often makes us more aware of the spring. As we drive through a dark night, may we halt for a moment and watch for the stars, the smile of the very stars of gratitude and love that is always there even in the darkest sky of the gloomiest night. As we sail along the ship of Life, may we remember that the winds often guide us to our destination and the storms only come to make our voyage even more adventurous, while the rain clears the cloud so that we may gaze at the full glory of the sky above, with a perfect smile through a voyage of imperfect moments of forever's shine. And so as we keep turning the pages of Life, may we remember to wear that Smile, through every leaf of Life, for Life is rooted in the blooming foliage of its imperfect perfection.

They stood there, lined up along the wall, gazing at the wonder of a sunset that blazed across the heavens. Where the sun was sinking, the skies ran with molten crimson that spread above the mountains like watercolor, changing to orange and pink, lavender and gold. A cool fire of platinum rimmed the profile of Gabriel Mountain and the dark, swelling ridges on either side. He put one arm around Dooley's shoulders and the other around Cynthia's waist. The fullness of his heart was inexpressible. All is safely gathered in . . . He knew it could not always be this way. . . No, nothing ever remained the same. If he had learned anything in life, he had learned that such moments were fragile beyond knowing. Ere the winter storms begin . . .

FLORENCE Soft emerald valleys lay in crimson light beneath the rolling hills; the waters of the Arno gleam like bronze the city's vein, so still. Each artist at the shore of the river stares in wonder and delight - how far do the lines reach across the bridge, beyond their work? One may seek rest under the cypresses and soft light of the August amber sun - here, at his grave, the city walls lay high around the garden, he knew once as paradise. His dark eyes still seem to pierce the lines of the hills, like he searches for his soul - still; (somewhere between the Arno and the nightfall). The trees - heavily laid with summer's fruit - stand high above the city in marble glance. Clear is now the dark sky - full of shards which dreamers call the stars.

And they were so very strange—these people! There were the boys and men who rose at dawn—yet never paused to watch the sun flood the world with light; who stayed in the fields all day—yet never raised their eyes to the big fleecy clouds overhead; who knew birds only as thieves after fruit and grain, and squirrels and rabbits only as creatures to be trapped or shot. The women—they were even more incomprehensible. They spent the long hours behind screened doors and windows, washing the same dishes and sweeping the same floors day after day. They, too, never raised their eyes to the blue sky outside, nor even to the crimson roses that peeped in at the window. They seemed rather to be looking always for dirt, yet not pleased when they found it—especially if it had been tracked in on the heel of a small boy's shoe!

Two suns burned in a copper sky overhead. One was large and somewhat oblong and gave off a dull orange light. The other was small and possessed a brilliant white incandescence at its core, ringed farther out by a silver corona. Large eruptions of reddish gas flowed from the surface of the orange sun, swirling through the void at a frightening pace, extending toward the smaller, bluish white sun. The flowing gases painted land and sky in startling colors, and whenever the gases wrapped entirely around the smaller sun, the void between them filled with an incandescent brilliance. The light cut the long flatness of space in half, sweeping aside all other illumination and shadow. Then the crimson gas flow would spiral inward and vanish in the blink of an eye, leaving the two suns to shine in the copper sky once more.

I think this dress will stun the nobility, and leave them stupefied with envy and lust," Madame Sandrine announced with relish. "I'm just glad it's not crimson, like everything else you drape," Farah said to her husband as she glanced at her transformation in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors across from the raised podium on which she stood. The creation of blue silk evoked the midnight sky, as it wrapped her bosom and waist in bejeweled gathers before cascading from her hips in a dark waterfall. The shamelessly cut bodice was lent a hint of respectability by folds of a shimmering diaphanous silver material draping from a choker of gems about her neck and flowing down her shoulders like moonbeams. To call them sleeves would have been a mistake, for all they concealed. Madame Sandrine threw a teasing look over her shoulder at Blackwell. "How fitting that the color of blood is the one you prefer the most." "Not for her," Dorian rumbled. The seamstress lifted a winged eyebrow, but didn't comment. "Voila. I believe that is all I'll need from you today, Madame Blackwell. I can have these finished in the morning, and in the meantime I have a lovely soft gray frock hemmed with tiny pink blossoms that will bring out the color in your cheeks.

Somewhere in the city, an orange cat finished chewing on a marjoram plant next to his studio apartment's door and leapt purring onto the shoulder of his owner, home early from work. Somewhere in the city, a young Chinese pianist sat down at a rehearsal hall and let his fingers play the first opening notes of the Emperor Concerto, notes that would envelop the small girl in row D of the Philharmonic that night in a shimmering cloud. A boy in Staten Island touched his finger to the lower back of the girl who had been just a friend until then. A woman in Hell's Kitchen stood in her dark attic garret, her paintbrush in hand, and stepped back from the painting of chartreuse highway and forest-green sky that had taken her two years to complete. A clerk in a Brooklyn bodega tapped her crimson fingernail on a box of gripe water, reassuring the new mother holding a wailing baby, and the mother's grateful smile almost made both of them cry themselves.

Then she lay down in the street, Right before the horses' feet, Expecting, with a patient eye, Murder, Fraud, and Anarchy. When between her and her foes A mist, a light, an image rose, Small at first, and weak, and frail Like the vapour of a vale: 27 Till as clouds grow on the blast, Like tower-crowned giants striding fast, And glare with lightnings as they fly, And speak in thunder to the sky, 28 It grew -- a Shape arrayed in mail Brighter than the viper's scale, And upborne on wings whose grain Was as the light of sunny rain. 29 On its helm, seen far away, A planet, like the Morning's, lay; And those plumes its light rained through Like a shower of crimson dew. 30 With step as soft as wind it passed O'er the heads of men -- so fast That they knew the presence there, And looked, -- but all was empty air. 31 As flowers beneath May's footstep waken, As stars from Night's loose hair are shaken, As waves arise when loud winds call, Thoughts sprung where'er that step did fall.

Etienne now commanded a view of the whole district. It was still very dark, but the old man had peopled the darkness with untold sufferings, which the young one could sense all round him in the limitless space. Could he not hear a cry of famine borne over this bleak country by the March wind? The gale had lashed itself into a fury and seemed to be blowing death to all labour and a great hunger that would finish off men by the hundred. And with his roving eye he tried to peer through the gloom, with a tormenting desire to see and yet a fear of seeing. Everything slid away in the dark unknown, and all he could see was distant furnaces and coke-ovens which, set in batteries of a hundred chimneys arranged obliquely, made sloping lines of crimson flames; whilst further to the left the two blast-furnaces were burning blue in the sky like monstrous torches. It was as depressing to watch as a building on fire: as far as the threatening horizon the only stars which rose were the nocturnal fires of the land of coal and iron.

I watched an orange-red crane turning against the blue background of the sky. I watched a black insect that drew a broad, foaming, icy furrow across the heavens. The eternal youth of the world makes me feel breathless. Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me. Yesterday evening I was going up the Boulevard Raspail and the sky was crimson: it seemed to me that I was walking upon an unknown planet where the grass might be violet, the earth blue. It was trees hiding the red glare of a neon-light advertisement.

The first flicker of dawn licked the eastern sky. The light grew stronger, revealing that the white larkspur had turned dark crimson overnight. Within her shrine, a new and beautiful light gray flower sprang from the ground, surrounding her. Asphodel. Kore touched the gentle flowers growing around her and shifted the coloring of her dress to a soft white, mimicking the color of the blossoms. How beautiful they were... like last night, like him, though she knew 'beautiful' was seldom applied to men, and was too soft a word for him anyway. Asphodel... she was the Maiden of the Flowers and knew that's what these were intuitively, but tried to remember where she had heard that name- and what their significance was. She had only ever seen asphodel as a gnarled dark gray weed. It was one of the few plants her mother would rip out of the fields wherever she had seen it. Kore had always trailed behind her, doing the same. She had never seen asphodel bud and and blossom. The white blooms were thin, veined with a centerline of crimson, six petals with bright filaments bursting from the center and ending in deep red anthers. They were beautiful and foreign.

Crucially, in this telling, Agamemnon did nothing more than slaughter a simple animal. It's poetic and pretty, and so very clean. But I saw her body convulse in her father's arms as he drew that blade across her throat. I held her, warm and bleeding and dead on the beach, while the sun climbed higher in the sky and the winds whipped up around us. I remember how the crimson-streaked saffron fabric fluttered around her ankles, and how I stared for so long at her face, not believing that he eyes would not open again and that she would not look at me and call me mother and kiss me.

Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man's beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.

She remembers blood. A fine mist which goes deep into her lungs, over her skin and through the air. She remembers a desert at dusk. The sky indigo blue and the fire bright, so bright that she can see everything. Near the fire, in the night, all she knows is chaos wrapped in crimson. All is death and nightmare with a single solitary dancer who smiles cruelly as he moves. He is power and darkness. He is man and beast, silver coin eyes and that face, those claws and the agony of loss. Time stretches wide; seconds like vast eons swallow up her world. Vince is dead, his mother, his brother and her small son ripped apart and gushing as he/it moves. She is screaming, a howl of agony beyond words, primal and wordless. Still he moves, faster than air, faster than she could ever be. Blood drips from her face as she grunts, running with her lungs on fire and her last remaining hope wrapped in her arms.

The Jewel in Her Crown, which showed the old Queen (whose image the children now no doubt confused with the person of Miss Crane) surrounded by representative figures of her Indian Empire: princes, landowners, merchants, moneylenders, sepoys, farmers, servants, children, mothers, and remarkably clean and tidy beggars. The Queen was sitting on a golden throne, under a crimson canopy, attended by her temporal and spiritual aides: soldiers, statesmen and clergy. The canopied throne was apparently in the open air because there were palm trees and a sky showing a radiant sun bursting out of bulgy clouds such as, in India, heralded the wet monsoon. Above the clouds flew the prayerful figures of the angels who were the benevolent spectators of the scene below. Among the statesmen who stood behind the throne one was painted in the likeness of Mr. Disraeli holding up a parchment map of India to which he pointed with obvious pride but tactful humility. An Indian prince, attended by native servants, was approaching the throne bearing a velvet cushion on which he offered a large and sparkling gem. The children in the school thought that this gem was the jewel referred to in the title. Miss Crane had been bound to explain that the gem was simply representative of tribute, and that the jewel of the title was India herself, which had been transferred from the rule of the British East India Company to the rule of the British Crown in 1858, the year after the Mutiny when the sepoys in the service of the Company (that first set foot in India in the seventeenth century) had risen in rebellion, and attempts had been made to declare an old Moghul prince king in Delhi, and that the picture had been painted after 1877, the year in which Victoria was persuaded by Mr. Disraeli to adopt the title Empress of India.

Marlboro Man picked me up the next evening, exactly one month before our wedding day. Our evening apart had made the heart grow fonder, and we greeted each other with a magnificently tight embrace. It filled my soul, the way his arms gripped me…how he almost always used his superior strength to lift me off the ground. A wannabe strong, independent woman, I was continually surprised by how much I loved being swept, quite literally, off my feet. We drove straight into the sunset, arriving on his ranch just as the sky was changing from salmon to crimson, and I gasped. I’d never seen anything so brilliant and beautiful. The inside of Marlboro Man’s pickup glowed with color, and the tallgrass prairie danced in the evening breeze. Things were just different in the country. The earth was no longer a mere place where I lived--it was alive. It had a heartbeat. The sight of the country absolutely took my breath away--the vast expanse of the flat pastures, the endless view of clouds. Being there was a spiritual experience.

Excepting the sublime breach—somewhere else to be described—this peaking of the whale’s flukes is perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the time, such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings.

He eases himself down to die. He thinks, others can do it and so can I. He inhales something: sweet raw smell of sawdust; from some-where, the scent of the Frescobaldi kitchen, wild garlic and cloves. He sees the movement from the corner of his eye as the spectators kneel and avert their faces. His mouth is dry, but he thinks, while I breathe I pray. 'All my confidence hope and trust, is in thy most merciful goodness...’ In the sky he senses movement. A shadow falls across his view. His father Walter is here, voice in the air. 'So now get up.' He lies broken on the cobbles of the yard of the house where he was born. His whole body is shuddering. 'So now get up. So now get up.' The pain is acute, a raw stinging, a ripping, a throb. He can taste his death: slow, metallic, not come yet. In his terror he tries to obey his father, but his hands cannot get a purchase, nor can he crawl. He is an eel, he is a worm on a hook, his strength has ebbed and leaked away beneath him and it seems a long time ago now since he gave his permission to be dead; no one has told his heart, and he feels it writhe in his chest, trying to beat. His cheek rests on nothing, it rests on red. He thinks, follow. Walter says, ‘That's right, boy, spew everywhere, spew everywhere on my good cobbles. Come on, boy, get up. By the blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet?' He is very cold. People imagine the cold comes after but it is now. He thinks, winter is here. I am at Launde. I have stumbled deep into the crisp white snow. I flail my arms in angel shape, but now I am crystal, I am ice and sinking deep: now I am water. Beneath him the ground upheaves. The river tugs him; he looks for the quick-moving Pattern, for the flitting, liquid scarlet. Between a pulse-beat and the next he shifts, going out on crimson with the tide of his inner sea. He is far from England now, far from these islands, from the waters salt and fresh. He has vanished; he is the slippery stones underfoot, he is the last faint ripple in the wake of himself. He feels for an opening, blinded, looking for a door: tracking the light along the wall.

Merry Autumn" It’s all a farce,—these tales they tell About the breezes sighing, And moans astir o’er field and dell, Because the year is dying. Such principles are most absurd,— I care not who first taught ’em; There’s nothing known to beast or bird To make a solemn autumn. In solemn times, when grief holds sway With countenance distressing, You’ll note the more of black and gray Will then be used in dressing. Now purple tints are all around; The sky is blue and mellow; And e’en the grasses turn the ground From modest green to yellow. The seed burrs all with laughter crack On featherweed and jimson; And leaves that should be dressed in black Are all decked out in crimson. A butterfly goes winging by; A singing bird comes after; And Nature, all from earth to sky, Is bubbling o’er with laughter. The ripples wimple on the rills, Like sparkling little lasses; The sunlight runs along the hills, And laughs among the grasses. The earth is just so full of fun It really can’t contain it; And streams of mirth so freely run The heavens seem to rain it. Don’t talk to me of solemn days In autumn’s time of splendor, Because the sun shows fewer rays, And these grow slant and slender. Why, it’s the climax of the year,— The highest time of living!— Till naturally its bursting cheer Just melts into thanksgiving.

And when the sun sets, it doesn't even matter. In a canopy of shadows, the life inside a soul never fails to peep through, as if a spark, a flicker holding on to that tunnel of hope, that bird of chained gallows. Yet in the shadows, a muffling voice keeps murmuring a tune that holds the chord of a surreal dream. They scream of scars yet each scar shines in the redolence of a fumed melody. And each time the breeze touches by, the setting sun smiles with a sketch of a dawn, a dusk that kisses the symphony of a crimson morn. And there in a sky of shadows lurks a setting dream, in a mirage of a rainbow, a rainbow of scattered stars, all along a setting sun. And when the sun sets, it doesn't even matter.

There’s an overlapping echo of waves dancing in my brain, and I can hear amidst it also the skittering exodus of a thousand crustaceans over the shifting sands of Riptide. Are they exploring? Scavenging? Migrating possibly. I cannot see them in this darkness, yet hold in mind briefly the image of their silhouettes against the shimmering sea reflecting the crimson evening sky, and through this immersion it becomes difficult to know what is real...

Orange and yellow way up high Morning and evening painted sky Pinks and purples come out at night Then tiny crystals shine bright Soft rays of light in the beginning of the day Brightening blue waters on the bay Crimson colors before a storm Enhancing feelings that makes us warm Savoring the beauty created by God Grateful for new days in a world that is flawed

Ode to Bees Multitude of bees! in and out of the crimson, the blue, the yellow, of the softest softness in the world; you tumble headlong into a corolla to conduct your business, and emerge wearing a golden suit and quantities of yellow boots. The waist, perfect, the abdomen striped with dark bars, the tiny, ever-busy head, the wings, newly made of water; you enter every sweet-scented window, open silken doors, penetrate the bridal chamber of the most fragrant love, discover a drop of diamond dew, and from every house you visit you remove honey, mysterious, rich and heavy honey, thick aroma, liquid, guttering light, until you return to your communal palace and on its gothic parapets deposit the product of flower and flight, the seraphic and secret nuptial sun! Multitude of bees! Sacred elevation of unity, seething schoolhouse. Buzzing, noisy workers process the nectar, swiftly exchanging drops of ambrosia; it is summer siesta in the green solitudes of Osorno. High above, the sun casts its spears into the snow, volcanoes glisten, land stretches endless as the sea, space is blue, but something trembles, it is the fiery, heart of summer, the honeyed heart multiplied, the buzzing bee, the crackling honeycomb of flight and gold! Bees, purest laborers, ogival workers fine, flashing proletariat, perfect, daring militia that in combat attack with suicidal sting; buzz, buzz above the earth's endowments, family of gold, multitude of the wind, shake the fire from the flowers, thirst from the stamens, the sharp, aromatic thread that stitches together the days, and propagate honey, passing over humid continents, the most distant islands of the western sky. Yes: let the wax erect green statues, let honey spill in infinite tongues, let the ocean be a beehive, the earth tower and tunic of flowers, and the world a waterfall, a comet's tail, a never-ending wealth of honeycombs! Pablo Neruda, Odes to Common Things. (Bulfinch; Illustrated edition, May 1, 1994)

She had killed him for a prize she didn't even want to win. Above them, the Blood Veil changed. The harsh crimson of the sky lessened slightly, a muted scarlet. But it did nothing to lighten the bloodstains on her hands

Every day at sunset I would visit a grove of birch trees…and lie down and listen to the steady rhythmic heartbeat of the earth. This grove had all the power of an ancient shrine. As the light intensified and the sky awash in crimson flames, I learned a way of being in the world and transition. Something within me changed as the earth underwent its own transfiguration and as the day’s activity gave way to the long, slow respiration of the night. I understood the rhythm of existence through the interplay of light and shadow and the subtle changes of the air and climate. In winter…I came to know that darkness is a time for the migration of the soul; I saw then then what we hold in common with the roots and seeds- a stage of mute and invisible growth. I would feel the breakthrough of the spring as the windswept sky and a sudden movement of the clouds.

D’tort flew away from the crowd before they took him down for good. He wasn’t expecting the Piglins of Crimson City to fight off a Nether Dragon like that! “What a bunch of losers. Who do they think they are?” D’tort roared as he flew high in the air. We were tailing him with Krop. “These Piglins have had enough of your wrongdoings, D’tort and so have we. Now will you face me like a real Nether Dragon?” Krop asked. “That’s what you want, isn’t it just because you are the all-powerful and almighty Original Nether Dragon? Do you think I already lost this battle? Then think twice!” D’tort landed once more, but this time right next to the police station. “I will set fire to this whole town, and there is no one who can stop me!” In this moment, a single arrow crossed the sky and hit D’tort in the eye. “Ouch! What is wrong with you?” D’tort screamed. “You won’t get away with your plans, Dragon. Give up right now!” Peter shouted with the crossbow in hands. Krop landed 100 meters away from D’tort. “You all stay down here and stay safe. I’ll battle D’tort and end this once and for all!” Krop said. We hopped off his back.

Summer Magic - 1880-1960 So many cares to vex the day, So many fears to haunt the night, My heart was all but weaned away From every lure of old delight. Then summer came, announced by June, With beauty, miracle and mirth. She hung aloft the rounding moon, She poured her sunshine on the earth, She drove the sap and broke the bud, She set the crimson rose afire. She stirred again my sullen blood, And waked in me a new desire. Before my cottage door she spread The softest carpet nature weaves, And deftly arched above my head A canopy of shady leaves. Her nights were dreams of jeweled skies, Her days were bowers rife with song, And many a scheme did she devise To heal the hurt and soothe the wrong. For on the hill or in the dell, Or where the brook went leaping by Or where the fields would surge and swell With golden wheat or bearded rye, I felt her heart against my own, I breathed the sweetness of her breath, Till all the cark of time had flown, And I was lord of life and death.

Pale crimson fingers fanned out to the east as the first rays of the sun broke over the horizon. The western sky was a deep purple, speckled with stars.

The castle overlooking Alfama and the rest of the city is perhaps Lisbon’s most emblematic landmark, and the view it offers is staggering. As the sun sets over the Atlantic—if you sailed that way, the first land mass you would come to is North America—the electric blue sky shifts through a kaleidoscope of colours. The sun fades to apricot, followed by more delicate hues: candy-pink and lilac, before a triumphant dying blast of violet, magenta and crimson.

He was aware of my Morgan shortcomings, including my many years spent training as a bookworm.

Weren’t elves known for their speed and light feet? I was known for my ability to eat a cheese wheel and read four novels in a weekend. We were not the same!

The sugar maples blazed crimson against a concrete sky. Fall was her favourite time of year. It was bold and unforgiving. No apologies, no half-cloaked secrets like hushed voices in hospital rooms.

Is this Illyrians?” asks Anaitis, looking up towards the crimson sky beyond the jaws of stone as if Artemis might send a falcon as a sign to answer her enquiry. Artemis will not. She is far too busy bathing naked in a dappled forest brook to give a damn about such things.

Let us always be out of doors among trees and grass, and rain and wind and sun. There the breeze comes and strikes the cheek and sets it aglow: the gale increases and the trees creak and roar, but it is only a ruder music. A calm follows, the sun shines in the sky, and it is the time to sit under an oak, leaning against the bark, while the birds sing and the air is soft and sweet. By night the stars shine, and there is no fathoming the dark spaces between these brilliant points, nor the thoughts that come as it were between the fixed stars and landmarks of the mind. Or it is morning on the hills, when hope is as wide as the world; or it is the evening on the shore. A red sun sinks, and the foam-tipped waves are crested with crimson; the booming surge breaks, and the spray flies afar, sprinkling the face watching under the pale cliffs. Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients call divine can be found and felt there still.

His snowshoe paws are encased in chains as he hops on his hind legs. On his forehead was placed a wreath of thorns, crimson and blasphemous it was. His eyes were drenched in white, no colors can be discerned whatsoever in the reflection of his pupils, only a harrowing stillness of nothingness can be glimpsed through his gaze. He was the image of a ghostly figure, his silhouette swirling like the clouds in the loftiest mountains in eternal Paradise; a divine messenger before all animals and humanity. He wears shimmering chest armor resembling the scorching rays of the sunlight, with a fire crown of thorns burning on his forehead, which embodies the colors of the Earth's horizon, showcasing seventeen stars in its center. He had a voluminous, metallic beard, which was made of arctic sand from the Northern Winter lands - it was wizardly like - something out of a mythical folk tale that comes from a children's novel. His body glistens like the shattered fragments from the Moon, with his fur appearing like green moss surrounded by waterfalls flowing from each corner on his appearance - evolving into snowflakes, ice, as well as winter storms if you inflict your might at his anguish. He’s a supernatural being that all the Witches of the globe worshiped. He is greater, more superior, more virtuous than all deities people pray to on Earth. He’s the lunar father of all the Heavens and Earth, the All-father of all Animals and Mankind. When you see the Hare flying in the skies of the Universe, He’s bestowing the blessings of Sprout, Summer, Autumn, Winter. As the Hare Lunar King steps on the green grass, the mountains will begin to shake, the oceans will become huge typhoons, earthquakes will rumble across the nations as mankind annihilates each other in the guise of the Hare Lunar Emperor. However, the hare will grieve for all humankind, for he knows that the Earth is devoid of vengeance, so he must demolish it in preparation to reconstruct it from a pristine foundation. That future is nigh, that soon will arrive - it’s unfolding as I converse. The Lunar Rabbit King is coming back with his swarm of rabbits - mankind will not evade the menace of long ears - for their King will tell the sinister world with a voice of a thundering lion roar, ‘it is completed! go into the depths of your abysmal eternity, and enslave yourself as the locust of the earth in the fires of tribulation, for you will be tormented from sunrise to sunset, where sunlight is no more; forevermore.

Furl your banners and hang you heads,” muttered the wind, “this is no time for tourney. Cast into my four arms those gaudy trappings, for what can cause you joy, O trees, at such a time as this?” “This rising Sun and the long bright bright day,” the beech cried out. “The setting Sun and the cool dark night,” the oak said quietly. “And the rain,” the pine murmured gratefully, “wit it’s gentle fingers finer than my needles.” The maple was silent. The wind spun around it’s rough gray trunk and sent a shower of gold into the sky. “O wind,” the maple said, “the side passage of the year from cold to heat, from growing to fruition, from birds nesting to their migrations, is joy enough for us. Let us celebrate it, O wind, before the snow lays it’s white fingers on us and bids us be silent for a time.” The maple spoke wistfully, golden leaves tumbling down the day at every word. “You speak of memories,” the wind went on. “I who have roamed the earth have seen suffering and cruelty and sorrow. You who stand so still in one place always must believe me.” “For you, O wind, perhaps it has been a year of sad revelation,” the beech said softly; “but for us it has been a year like all others—rising suns and waxing moons, rains and dews and storms, and the seasons marching in orderly procession around us.” “Ah,” the wind wailed, clutching at gold and scarlet and green, “how can you hold those banners high when evil still stalks the earth?” The trees quivered and were silent. The wind raged around them, and his fury brought down cascades of leaves, which he sent hurling over the dry ground. “We hold our banners high in faith, O wind,” the pine spoke out, lifting its voice so the wind would hear, “emblem for this brief moment of the pledge we have made. We have heard before of these things that you would tell us. The stars have told us many strange tales, and the moon has told us even stranger ones. But we must still be faithful.” “To what?” moaned the wind, annoyed that his words could not deter the trees from their galliard ways. “To the everlasting right at the heart of things,” replied the maple. “Evil has but a little day, O wind, and good has a thousand.” The banners were fading and falling, and the wind laughed to himself that the brave words of the trees must be as thin and fleeting. He stamped and reached high, swept over the ground and leapt aloft, while leaves fell in a gilded shower about him. Cheering at his triumph, he looked through bare branches to the sky, heavy with scudding clouds. Oak, maple, beech were silenced now. Dark trunks stood rooted in the earth, crossed boughs were held uplifted to the heavens. The pine swayed slowly, it’s heraldic blazon of sable and vert gleaming darkly. “Look higher, wind, than those bare boughs. Look wider.” The wind looked, and there, outlined against the sunset gold, on every twig tight buds were tipping: the crimson secret of the oak, the enscaled cradle of the maple, the little sheathed sword of the beech. “Faith, my friend,” the pine said in a whisper, “faith has the last word always.” The wind bowed low, low enough to kiss the leaves that swirled around him in a moment of ecstasy; then the wind went on his way down the archway of the year that was luminous with promise.

Jobs I Have Had (cont’d): I once demonstrated fill-in painting at a ten-cent store. I would gather a crowd around me and take out my Sylvan Scene Number 10 cardboard with its jigsaw of shapes, all numbered. For about three minutes, I would do my cyborgian routine, showing the shoppers how to put bleeding-gum crimson in all the 5’ s—never in a 7 or a 2. Then, all of a sudden, I would go crazy. I could not bring myself to stay within the lines. My blind-man blue would stray from the 52-to-75 lower-sky section, where it belonged, and would begin to invade the cavity yellow of the 45-to-48 cloud tinge. But the management kept me on. They merely warned against sloppiness, saying prissily, “Neatness counts, neatness counts.

You belong to me, and I intend to claim what is mine.

But cacti know the real trick. Sometime in the last 35 million years, they rolled up their primordial leaves into spines, the most daring fashion accessory of the season. Multipurpose, too: a useful defense against nibblers, and a kind of sunshade and air-conditioning system in one. In the absence of leaves, photosynthesis moved to the green, leathery skin. Here another innovation took place: cacti learned to keep their pores (known as stomata) closed during the day, to prevent moisture from siphoning away into the unforgiving sky. They open their pores only during the cool hours of the night, squirreling away pockets of carbon dioxide, and complete the task of making sugar during the day. They also store water under their waxy skins and quickly grow networks of tiny roots after rain to siphon up moisture. One good storm can sustain a cactus through several years of drought. For all this, cacti can be extravagant too, coming out in showy blossoms in shades of cerise, gold, and crimson as gaudy as any high school prom dress. Clover and Jotter couldn’t have known all this (the details of cactus photosynthesis wouldn’t be worked out for decades). But in cataloging plants that thrived in extremes, they were adding to the general picture of evolution and adaptation, tracing the subtle threads of a tapestry that had been in the making for 3.5 billion years.

She’ll be at my side while I’m here, and for everyone playing at home, she’s the literal definition of fuck around and find out.

As a modern woman, there was no way I should have a slow curling of heat in my stomach, dripping intimately to my center until my entire body ached. Mine, should have had me running and screaming about red flags, and yet… were they red? There was pink in there. It was looking very pink. I mean, red was practically a shade of pink if you thought about it. Like, really thought about it.

Weren’t elves known for their speed and light feet? I was known for my ability to eat a cheese wheel and read four novels in a weekend.

As crimson colors rush in, sunset becomes God's portrayal in the sky.....

Beyond the rage and betrayal lies another world where dreams unfold and sunsets ripen into crimson blazes. I will meet you there.

Twilight was reaching its climax, no doubt: the last fires of the sun, like a violent dermatitis, ruched and ravined the horizon, giving it blisters, edema, and creases — the yellows, oranges, turquoise, ocher, reddish purples, crimsons, and browns became more vivid as the star descended, becoming bruises, scales, scabs, clots, and even bleeding eviscerations, as though the sky were reproducing the painful sequence of it's birth, what psychoanalysts call repetition compulsion.

Tinges of crimson glowed momentarily, before masses of ink and grey crowded in. Constable’s sky would not have looked more poetic on its canvas with such a spillage of riotous colours. Vapours crossed broodingly about in emptiness, right before a melt-down. Quick lightening crept through unpredictably in toothed lines, followed by bellows from heavens above. Nalia began to run like a petrified black gazelle.

The fog, which Meg knew from her father wasn’t fog at all, but low-lying clouds, began to burn off as the morning sun continued its climb through a blue-gray sky. The Golden Gate Bridge came into focus right before her eyes through a cloud that caressed the crimson metal into view.

Loretta snuggled deeply into silken furs, trying to escape the persistent hand that shook her shoulder and the voice that called to her. Not her name, anyway. Blue Eyes. What kind of name was that? “Blue Eyes, you will be awake now. Home…you wish for home?” Home. Amy and Aunt Rachel. The gray down quilt. Pork slab and eggs for breakfast. Coffee on the porch when the sun peeked over the horizon and streaked the sky with crimson. Home. To laughter and love and safety. Oh, yes, she wished for home. “Be awake, little one. This Comanche will take you back. Loh-rhett-ah? Wake up, Hoos-cho Soh-nips, Bird Bones, you must eat and grow strong so you can go home. To your people and your wooden walls.” Loretta opened her eyes. She rolled onto her back and blinked. A dark face swam above her. Funny, but blinking didn’t bring him into focus. She reached out, curious, then thought better of it. “You will make the honey talk with me? We will make a treaty between us, one with no tiv-ope, writing. You will eat and grow strong, and I will take you to your people.” Honey talk. All lies, according to Hunter. Loretta peered up. She ran her tongue across her lips and tried to swallow. “H-home?” she croaked. “Huh, yes, Blue Eyes. Home. But you must eat so you can live to go back. And drink. For three days. Until you are strong again.” His fingertips grazed her cheek and trailed lightly into her hair. “Then this Comanche will take you.” “You will?” she rasped. “It is a promise I make. You will eat and drink?” Loretta closed her eyes. She had to be dreaming. But oh, what a lovely dream it was. To go home. To have Hunter volunteer to take her there. No need to worry that his wrath would rain upon her family. “No tricks. You swear it?” “No tricks.” His voice echoed and reechoed inside her head, loud, then like a whisper. She fought to open her eyes. The darkness was surrounding her again. “Then I will eat.

The sky is stained red with the blood of a thousand dying sacrifices.

Ah, I see your point. I did assist on the Okinawa drop, as the British representative. Quite simple, after we’d seen the Berlin effects. Another ground-pounder drop near the top of that mountain, killed the army inside, without too many of the villagers on the mountain’s other side. Precision, rather.” Plus Hiroshima a few weeks later, Karl thought, and so the war ended in crimson blisters. Their crowd grew. Karl saw parading at the head of a column of tourists a Bavarian girl in the traditional garb of apron and knee-length white socks. The Germans were anxiously amiable, voices ringing high in the sweet warm air. If they had been dogs, their tails would have constantly wagged. The swirl and charm of these streets still caught at his heart. As good as it gets, a phrase he had heard somewhere, rang in him. Yet he knew that beyond these blithe provinces the world called the West, the world’s pain played out in the presence of God’s unimpeachable policy of No Comment. The silence of these skies . . . , he thought, and wondered if maybe he needed a glass of something delicious and reassuring. Red, yes. Maybe a Burgundy. The eighteenth-century

When I hurt, and I hurt often, I raced for the music, the costumes, the ballet shoes on which I could spin and twirl and dance away my troubles. And somewhere in that crimson-colored never-never land where I pirouetted madly, in a wild and crazy effort to exhaust myself into insensibility, I saw that man, shadowy and distant, half-hidden behind towering white columns that rose clear up to a purple sky. In a passionate pas de deux he danced with me, forever apart, no matter how hard I sought to draw nearer and leap into his arms, where I could feel them protective about me, supporting me . . . and with him I’d find, at last, a safe place to live and love.

for the typical man to appreciate, it was the sight through the upper door that was equaled by none. The San Juan Mountains stood tall against the horizon and walled off the surrounding aspen groves that were alive and in full bloom with early autumn colors. Clouds drifted miles away and miles above, gracing the clear blue sky with their company and casting shadows across rolling hills that were dominated by the greens, reds, and golds of a Colorado paradise. The majestic view threatened to take hold of their attention, but Adam and his boy were there to finish what they had started two days earlier, and their eyes were focused on the tree line below.

Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.” —John 7:24 (NIV) Driving home from work, I glanced into my rearview mirror to see a beautiful pink sky. It looked like another great sunset. I turned onto my street and noticed three young teenage boys hanging out two doors down from where I live. Too bad they won’t notice this great sunset, I thought. I pulled into my driveway and walked inside. My husband, Johnny, called out from the backyard, “Beautiful sunset tonight! Come on out!” The sky had turned a bright crimson red with streaks of leftover pink etched through it. I glanced to where the boys were still talking. “Those boys have no clue that there is a magnificent sunset happening right before their eyes! Too bad,” I said, shaking my head. At that moment, I heard one of them call out, “Hey, guys, check it out! The sky’s all red! It looks awesome!” “Wow!” the others exclaimed in unison. “Cool!” “Oh my,” I said, dismayed, “I sure jumped to a mighty quick conclusion.” Later that evening, I read an inspirational quote that comes daily to my in-box: “When you’re forming your opinions, do it carefully—go slow; hasty judgments oft are followed by regretting—that I know. —Anon.” After work the next day, I saw the boys again. I pulled the car over and rolled down the window. “Hey, guys,” I called out, “great sunset last night, huh?” “Yes, ma’am!” they all replied. One of the boys held up his cell phone. “I got a really good picture of it on my phone. Want to see?” “Sure,” I said with a big smile. “I’d love to.” Forgive me, Lord, for I truly want to see the best in everyone—right from the start. —Melody Bonnette Swang Digging Deeper: Prv 12:18, 31:26

After several hours the ship slowed and the sky outside had faded to deep crimson wash. The air over the jungle had changed, filled with a dark, toxic humidity, and Talis could see thick mounds of smoke rising from a wasteland of huts and tents and buildings that were surrounded by tall wooden walls. The City of Seraka. A stone fortress and a castle on the left side of the city overlooked the docks. It reeked of human misery and greed. Talis spotted slaves being unloaded from several docked ships, slaves of all races, children and mothers and old women. Where were the men? Talis wondered.

The crown of shadows that capped his golden hair seemed to draw a rich dark tint from the crimson velvet of his breeches, and his eyes caught more light than the sunset sky had to offer.

As she did this Tia, eyeing the two who watched them, suddenly felt angry with them for their helplessness. She felt like shouting at them to wake and stir themselves from their apathy ... but then the feeling went. She saw a town burning, flames arching over the night sky, people screaming and shouting, panic reaching through the streets and houses and, somewhere, a small boy lost and frightened, crying for his parents. And she remembered her own panic, numbess and helplessness as Tulio and his wife had done everything for her, sending her blindly off into the night from her brother's burning villa.

First she sang of a man and a woman who fall in love. Then how love justifies any sacrifice. And so, as the moon crossed the sky, the nightingale sang and the most beautiful rose of the rosebush was being crimsoned by her blood. “Faster,” said the rosebush at one point. “The sun will rise soon.

Emuri’en, be kind, I prayed, with a glance at the moonless sky. Let us survive the trials that await us. Don’t knot our threads together, only to sever them.

Through his opened bedroom window, he noticed that the night sky had turned a crimson red. The moon, punctured by hues of cerulean blue, hung precariously over the withering willow trees that lined the riverbank, located several hundred yards away. The storm predicted by the forecasters was heading his way.

Ah, a crimson sunset above the silhouette of the ocean. It blazes with brilliance and arouses all the passion and yearning in the soul of the beholder. Many found themselves awash in its burst of colors while others never minded to stop and appreciate it because they were awash in lesser things. Sunset is always wiser than sunrise because it adds the experience of an entire day to your being. While you may prefer a cloudless blue sky and an easy, pleasant day, don’t forget that setting sun needs cloudy skies to manifest its grandest of all earthly spectacles and mundane days require arduous challenges to experience the true joy of life. it is incredible how at every sunset, the sky is a different shade, with no cloud ever in the same place. Each day is a new masterpiece, a new wonder, a new memory. Every sunset is an opportunity to reset, as it brings the promise of a new dawn.

rose from the plain before them, peaceful and solid—very solid—in the autumn sun. The day was warm and beautiful, and the air was alive with the rich, earthy smells of the river and forest. He’d never seen such a forest. The trees that edged the plain and grew all along the banks of the St. Lawrence grew impenetrably thick, now blazing with gold and crimson. Seen against the darkness of the water and the impossible deep blue of the vast October sky, the whole

Numerous members of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade had engaged in similar displays before. They’d stand on top of the building, wave a flag, shout slogans through megaphones, and scatter flyers at the attackers below. Every time, the courageous man or woman had been able to retreat safely from the hailstorm of bullets and earn glory for their valor. The new girl clearly thought she’d be just as lucky. She waved the battle banner as though brandishing her burning youth, trusting that the enemy would be burnt to ashes in the revolutionary flames, imagining that an ideal world would be born tomorrow from the ardor and zeal coursing through her blood.… She was intoxicated by her brilliant, crimson dream until a bullet pierced her chest. Her fifteen-year-old body was so soft that the bullet hardly slowed down as it passed through it and whistled in the air behind her. The young Red Guard tumbled down along with her flag, her light form descending even more slowly than the piece of red fabric, like a little bird unwilling to leave the sky. The Red Union warriors shouted in joy. A few rushed to the foot of the building, tore away the battle banner of the April Twenty-eighth Brigade, and seized the slender, lifeless body. They raised their trophy overhead and flaunted it for a while before tossing it toward the top of the metal gate of the compound. Most of the gate’s metal bars, capped with sharp tips, had been pulled down at the beginning of the factional civil wars to be used as spears, but two still remained. As their sharp tips caught the girl, life seemed to return momentarily to her body. The Red Guards backed up some distance and began to use the impaled body for target practice. For her, the dense storm of bullets was now no different from a gentle rain, as she could no longer feel anything. From time to time, her vinelike arms jerked across her body softly, as though she were flicking off drops of rain.

He shushed her quietly as he slipped his fingers into her hair, his thumb resting at the hollow of her ear as he cradled her head in his hand. He tilted her up to look at him. It felt incredible. It felt wrong. It was overwhelming. She couldn’t do anything except feel him. His hand, his touch, his nails against her scalp. But then, there was what came with it. The feeling of dark wings spreading out against a night sky. The joy of the hunt. The beauty of the stars painted behind a crimson moon that followed him wherever he went. Beneath it was the taste of sand. The taste of an old sun, burning him. Blood. Hunger. The joy of victory. The coldness of the grave. Him.

Another splash of crimson fell and another, this one farther from where I stood. It was blood. But it wasn’t mine. It fell from above. The skies bled.

and wife are two windows, each letting light into a home, light that seamlessly blends, brightening and sanctifying the marriage

It fell, one ruby drop at a time, splattering on the boy’s open, lifeless eye. A little trail of red ran from the eye down the side of his face. Like crimson tears. That night, Kaladin huddled in the barrack, listening to a highstorm buffet the wall. He curled against the cold stone. Thunder shattered the sky outside. I can’t keep going like this, he thought. I’m dead inside, as sure as if I’d taken a spear through the neck. The storm continued its tirade. And for the first time in over eight months, Kaladin found himself crying.

After the fire passed us it marched on across the dune tops into the Kalahari, lighting the night sky like a spectacular sunset. Behind it, the cool pink glow of burned-out trees and logs remained, until the fire’s crimson was lost in the blush of dawn.

You will feel my kiss this night, Maxine Parker.” Crimson eyes were lidded as they watched her, the desire in them undisguised and burning as bright as the red moon in the sky.

He looked up at the night sky, feeling better under the cloak of darkness. He could almost feel the night absorbing into his skin -- revitalizing his cells the way the sunlight used to.

Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

romance moved fast, and though Evie found it hard to imagine now, once she’d been a passionate lover. Once, she’d been on fire. Evie could put her finger precisely on the moment when things changed. It was an unusually warm evening; the sun was just settling, a deep crimson in the sky and she had been feeling a little low. Dr Stackhouse put it down to the menopause. She did not want to tell him that was already well behind her. So she smiled at him, in spite of the mild embarrassment, and headed for Carlinville, a six months’ supply of St John’s Wort and Evening Primrose Oil in her bag. Her mood had not lifted in months. Maybe she already knew something had changed between them. Paul came home that day, dangled a shiny set of keys before her. ‘It’s a classic,’ he told her. He forced a smile, but there was, she knew, nothing behind it. ‘I’ve bought it for us. I thought maybe I could take you out for spins, and if the weather is fine, we could bring a picnic.’ ‘Or perhaps I could drive…’ she said hopefully. ‘Dear, Evie, we both know where that almost ended up.’ Her father had made sure it was one of the few things he told Paul. He enjoyed recounting her near brush with the law and her habit of resting a little too heavily, in his opinion, on the accelerator. ‘We don’t want you thinking you’re in Monaco, do we?’ Paul smiled. He had no idea how much his words hurt. He had no more aspirations for her than her father had. Maybe he wanted to take care of her, but all too soon, he was taking care of someone else. In his expression, her whole world seemed to topple over. She knew that he was trapped. Trapped by his love for

Spain is where Gray’s godmother, Red Wire, and her husband, Red Dancer, had made their home. Their feathers were bright crimson-pink. They were high-energy and great sky-dancers.

You will hear thunder and remember me, And think: she wanted storms. The rim Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire. —Anna Akhmatova, You Will Hear Thunder

We sat down on a rude bench, under a group of magnificent lime trees. The sun was setting with all its melancholy splendour behind the sylvan horizon, and the stream that flows beside our home, and passes under the steep old bridge I have mentioned, wound through many a group of noble trees, almost at our feet, reflecting in its current the fading crimson of the sky.

Have you ever lost yourself In the sunset that washes the sky Of the day’s garish glory And paints crimson In the hour of blush? Have you ever seen A poise of the busy life, where power and wealth lose their pride, for a human is called by the rosy mystery! Have you ever seen how the heart floats in the sky, Gently, gently over the clouds of worry, Into the westerly where colors splash, Where poems just begin, Where lovers get lost in the gaze. Have you ever seen how sunset Takes us to the other side of life, Where despairs die and dreams are born, For therein lies a lover’s glance, In the sweetness and hunger To taste a cup of crimson.

The Sunset Have you ever lost yourself In the sunset that washes the sky Of the day’s garish glory And paints crimson In the hour of blush? Have you ever seen A poise of the busy life, where power and wealth lose their pride, for a human is called by the rosy mystery! Have you ever seen how the heart floats in the sky, Gently, gently over the clouds of worry, Into the westerly where colors splash, Where poems just begin, Where lovers get lost in the gaze. Have you ever seen the sky of crimson spread heavenly sweets, And have you ever sensed the wild and drunken gaze in the language of lovers? Have you ever seen how sunset Takes us to the other side of life, Where despairs die and dreams are born, For therein lies a lover’s glance, In the sweetness and hunger To taste a cup of crimson.

Gaze deeply as the sky unfolds from daylight into crimson. Remain in awe at how the sky blushes as the sun leaves its farewell touch behind. Like the unfolding of day and night, you too unfold from season to season, moment to moment. Who you were a day ago is altered into who you are now. Who you are today will be altered into who you will be tomorrow. This alteration brings in the metamorphosis of the soul.

One Day Eight Years Ago - Poem by Jibanananda Das It was heard: to the post-mortem cell he had been taken; last night—in the darkness of Falgoon-night When the five-night-old moon went down— he was longing for death. His wife lay beside—the child therewith; hope and love abundant__in the moonlight—what ghost did he see? Why his sleep broke? Or having no sleep at all since long—he now has fallen asleep in the post-mortem cell. Is this the sleep he’d longed for! Like a plagued rat, mouth filled with crimson froth now asleep in the nook of darkness; And will not ever awake anymore. ‘Never again will wake up, never again will bear the endless—endless burden of painful waking—’ It was told to him when the moon sank down—in the strange darkness by a silence like the neck of a camel that might have shown up at his window side. Nevertheless, the owl stays wide awake; The rotten still frog begs two more moments in the hope for another dawn in conceivable warmth. We feel in the deep tracelessness of flocking darkness The unforgiving enmity of the mosquito-net all around; The mosquito loves the stream of life awake in its monastery of darkness. From sitting in blood and filth, flies fly back into the sun; How often we watched moths and flies hovering in the waves of golden sun. The close-knit sky, as if—as it were, some scattered lives, possessed their hearts; The wavering dragonflies in the grasp of wanton kids Fought for life; As the moon went down, in the impending gloom With a noose in hand you approached the aswattha, alone, by yourself, For you’d learnt a human would ne’er live the life of a locust or a robin The branch of aswattha Had it not raged in protest? And the flock of fireflies Hadn’t they come and mingled with the comely bunch of daffodils? Hadn’t the senile blind owl come over and said: ‘the age-old moon seems to have been washed away by the surging waters? Splendid that! Let’s catch now rats and mouse! ’ Hadn’t the owl hooted out this cherished affair? Taste of life—the fragrance of golden corn of winter evening— seemed intolerable to you; — Content now in the morgue In the morgue—sultry with the bloodied mouth of a battered rat! Listen yet, tale of this dead; — Was not refused by the girl of love, Didn’t miss any joy of conjugal life, the bride went ahead of time and let him know honey and the honey of reflection; His life ne’er shivered in demeaning hunger or painful cold; So now in the morgue he lies flat on the dissection table. Know—I know woman’s heart—love—offspring—home—not all there is to things; Wealth, achievement, affluence apart there is some other baffling surprise that whirls in our veins; It tires and tires, and tires us out; but there is no tiring in the post mortem cell and so, there he rests, in the post mortem cell flat on the dissection table. Still I see the age-old owl, ah, Nightly sat on the aswattha bough Winks and echoes: ‘The olden moon seems to be carried away by the flooding waters? That’s splendid! Let’s catch now rats and mouse—’ Hi, granny dear, splendid even today? Let me age like you—and see off the olden moon in the whirlpool at the Kalidaha; Then the two of us will desert life’s abundant reserve.

There are three things that are difficult to keep hidden: a fire, a cold, and love. —Polish Proverb

1683 he aided the legendary King Jan Sobieski and much of Christian Europe in keeping Vienna—and therefore Eastern Europe—from the Turks.

Jurata, Queen of the Baltic.

There’s no key to the woods and fields.

Look!” The Khwaja nudged a sleepy Bizhad. What was white before sparkled with a fine glaze of crimson, smearing the ashen tents that housed soldiers and animals inside the fort’s walls, lighting up the city of palaces and mosques, casting a halo over the silent fountains and the imperial boat. One by one, the great doorways of the fort gleamed like mirrors, reflecting the sun, now a spear’s length over the horizon. Marble palaces breathed free of the crisscrossing beams, managing to stand aloof from common homes. The intruder, satisfied by the result, turned an effortless gold – a gold coin floating on the river, at its still centre. A bird called, flew across, reflecting the world on its tiny wings – the lapis sky, the turquoise river, the crimson fort and the golden sun. “Look!” The Khwaja whispered into Bizhad’s ear, tracing its flight with his raised finger. “The finest artist in all Agra!” And so on Saturday the twenty-seventh of Rabi, year 975 of the Hegira, 1568 of the Christian era, the sun lit imperial Agra, blessing every moment and delighting every one of its subjects. It rose for the ten thousandth time since that dawn when Babur, the Mughal invader, had woken after a restful night to find himself the conqueror of Hindustan. Under the western wall of the fort, his grandson, the emperor, was about to rise. Rise and begin his favorite sport – racing elephants when they are in their frightening best. In heat.

sedimentary time. The lowest stratum, or the layer immediately above the Deterrence Center, had probably been deposited four billion years ago. The Earth had been born only five hundred million years before that. The turbid ocean was in its infancy, and nonstop flashes of lightning struck its surface; the Sun was a fuzzy ball of light in a haze-veiled sky, casting a crimson reflection over the sea. At short intervals, other bright balls of light streaked across the sky, crashing into the sea and trailing long tails of fire; these meteor strikes caused tsunamis that propelled gigantic waves to smash onto continents still laced with rivers of lava, raising clouds of vapor generated by fire and water that dimmed the Sun.… In contrast to this hellish but magnificent sight, the turbid water brewed a microscopic tale. Here, organic molecules were born from lightning flashes and cosmic rays, and they collided, fused, broke apart again—a long-lasting game played with building blocks for five hundred million years. Finally, a chain of organic molecules, trembling, split into two strands. The strands attracted other molecules around them until two identical copies of the original were made, and these split apart again and replicated themselves.… In this game of building blocks, the probability of producing such a self-replicating chain of organic molecules was so minuscule that it was as if a tornado had picked up a pile of metallic trash and deposited it as a fully-assembled Mercedes-Benz. But it happened, and so, a breathtaking history of 3.5 billion years had begun.

We thank you for the offer, healer, but Shea is unused to our ways.” Jacques couldn’t remember most of them himself. He was as uneasy in the presence of the Carpathian as Shea. His black eyes glittered like ice, caught and trapped the reflection of a lightning whip as it sizzled across the dark sky. “The other male is not with you.” “Byron,” Mikhail supplied. “He has been a good friend to you for centuries. He is aware that you completed the ritual and this woman is your true lifemate. Search your mind, Jacques. Remember how difficult this time is on our unattached males.” Shea’s face went crimson under the unearthly paleness. The reference to the ritual had to mean they were aware Jacques had made love to her. The lack of privacy disturbed her immensely. She went to move around Jacques, strongly objecting to the this woman label. She did have a name. She was a person. She had a feeling they all thought her the hysterical type. She certainly hadn’t managed to show them her normal calm self. Jacques stepped backward and his arm swept behind him to pin her against the wall. He never took his eyes from the trio before them. He knew he was unstable, still fighting to hold on to reason when his every instinct was to attack. He trusted none of them and would not allow Shea to be put in any danger. Shea retaliated with a hard pinch. She was not going to cower behind her wild man like some seventeenth-century heroine fainting with the vapors. So she was surrounded by a few vampires. Big deal. Carpathians. Jacques sounded amused. If you laugh at me, Jacques, I might find another wooden stake and come after you myself, she warned him silently. “Well, for heaven’s sake.” Shea sounded exasperated as she addressed the group. “We’re all civilized, aren’t we?” She shoved at Jacques’ broad back. “Aren’t we?” “Absolutely.” Raven stepped forward, ignoring Mikhail’s restraining hand. “At least the women are. The men around here haven’t quite graduated from the swinging-through-trees stage yet.” “I owe you an apology for last night, Miss O’Halloran,” Mikhail said with far too much Old World charm. “When I saw you crouched over my brother, I thought…” Raven snorted. “He didn’t think, he reacted. He really is a great man, but overprotective with the people he loves.” There was a wealth of love in her teasing tone. “Honestly, Jacques, you can’t keep her prisoner, locked up like some nun in a convent.” Shea was mortified. Jacques, move! You’re embarrassing me.

Moments later, as the specter exited through the window it had entered, Victor Xerxes Valenzuela once again found himself floating out at sea. Only this time the ocean was a viscous crimson, the sky above, a lackluster black.

THE DEPOT at Nochecita had smooth stuccoed apricot walls, trimmed in a somehow luminous shade of gray—around the railhead and its freight sheds and electrical and machine shops, the town had grown, houses and businesses painted vermilion, sage, and fawn, and towering at the end of the main street, a giant sporting establishment whose turquoise and crimson electric lamps were kept lit all night and daytime, too, for the place never closed. There was an icehouse and a billiard parlor, a wine room, a lunch and eating counter, gambling saloons and taquerías. In the part of town across the tracks from all that, Estrella Briggs, whom everybody called Stray, was living upstairs in what had been once the domestic palace of a mine owner from the days of the first great ore strikes around here, now a dimly illicit refuge for secret lives, dark and in places unrepainted wood rearing against a sky which since this morning had been threatening storm. Walkways in from the street were covered with corrugated snow-shed roofing. The restaurant and bar on the ground-floor corner had been there since the boom times, offering two-bit all-you-can-eat specials, sawdust on the floor, heavy-duty crockery, smells of steaks, chops, venison chili, coffee and beer and so on worked into the wood of the wall paneling, old trestle tables, bar and barstools. At all hours the place’d be racketing with gambling-hall workers on their breaks, big-hearted winners and bad losers, detectives, drummers, adventuresses, pigeons, and sharpers. A sunken chamber almost like a natatorium at some hot-springs resort, so cool and dim that you forgot after a while about the desert waiting out there to resume for you soon as you stepped back into it. . . .

We Are Made One with What We Touch and See We are resolved into the supreme air, We are made one with what we touch and see, With our heart’s blood each crimson sun is fair, With our young lives each spring impassioned tree Flames into green, the wildest beasts that range The moor our kinsmen are, all life is one, and all is change. With beat of systole and of diastole One grand great life throbs through earth’s giant heart, And mighty waves of single Being roll From nerveless germ to man, for we are part Of every rock and bird and beast and hill, One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill One sacrament are consecrate, the earth Not we alone hath passions hymeneal, The yellow buttercups that shake for mirth At daybreak know a pleasure not less real Than we do, when in some freshblossoming wood We draw the spring into our hearts, and feel that life is good Is the light vanished from our golden sun, Or is this daedalfashioned earth less fair, That we are nature’s heritors, and one With every pulse of life that beats the air? Rather new suns across the sky shall pass, New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass. And we two lovers shall not sit afar, Critics of nature, but the joyous sea Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be Part of the mighty universal whole, And through all Aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!. We shall be notes in that great Symphony Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres, And all the live World’s throbbing heart shall be One with our heart, the stealthy creeping years Have lost their terrors now, we shall not die, The Universe itself shall be our Immortality!

I swore one thing to myself which I was determined to follow through on, no matter the cost. Lionel Acrux would die tonight, and I would be the one painting the world crimson with his blood.

raised my hands toward the sky and cast fire at the heavens, a huge line of crimson and sapphire igniting the entire cliff in the urgent and magnificent light. “I need help!

The Franciscan has turned the city of my birth against me. He wants to feast on my shame, but I won't let him. He will merely hear me thunder and remember me with rage. In the weeks to come, he will look up, and the rim of the sky will be crimson, and he will wish I hadn't lit him on fire.

Within you is a soul of light that surpasses the glorious dawn and the crimson sky at sundown.

You’re my sunset sky, baby. Bright and mysterious and beautiful all at the same time.

I am longing for you, for this moment, when daylight dissolves in the crimson blush of sky, when poetry comes to kiss our souls. I am longing for you, for this moment when daylight melts in the kiss of night, when the sun softens a little in the thirsty gaze of moon. I am longing for you, for this moment when the day pauses a little to give in to the inviting arms of night, so you and I can melt in the flames of feelings. I am longing for you, for this moment when daylight wonders, should it be bold like the garish gold, or should it soften as the moon, the pearl in the sea of dark.

I am longing for you, for this moment, when daylight dissolves in the crimson blush of sky, when poetry comes to kiss our souls. I am longing for you, for this moment when daylight melts in the kiss of night, when the sun softens a little in the thirsty gaze of night. I am longing for you, for this moment when the day pauses a little to give in to the inviting arms of night, so you and I can melt in the flames of longing. I am longing for you, for this moment when daylight wonders, should it be bold like the garish gold, or should it soften as the moon, the pearl in the sea of dark.

I am longing for you, for this moment, when daylight dissolves in the crimson blush of sky, when poetry comes to kiss our souls. I am longing for you, for this moment when daylight melts in the kiss of night, when the sun softens a little in the thirsty gaze of moon. I am longing for you, for this moment when the day pauses a little to give in to the inviting arms of night, so you and I can melt in the flames of longing. I am longing for you, for this moment when daylight wonders, should it be bold like the garish gold, or should it soften as the moon, the pearl in the sea of dark.

When torment tears me inside, And I sense autumn as a melancholic rain, There I wonder, what shall I do with the grief so dense? So I say to this soul of mine, This earth I love, will reveal new pathways. And so I open as a flower in the scent of rain, Make music out of memories that remain. I climb to the peaks, kissing the sky, Longing to speak of the strength they hold, I rush to the rivers, melodious in flow, And sense music in the ripples, when wild winds blow. I search for the stars when the night spread over earth, Unafraid of dark, looking up at the sky. When morning laughs lazily over the meadows, The daffodils I watch, spreading gold on the fields. When time rolls by and sunset kisses the sky, I fill my soul with the cup of crimson. When night steals the earth, and darkness comes down, The memories I weave, into the flowers of light.

into the Void. He will need a faithful second, neh? All gone, like autumn leaves, all the future and the present, Crimson Sky and destiny.

She’s a glimpse of something spectacular, the dance of fireflies on the night breeze, the roll of aurora clouds through the skies, the gentle wash of the ocean glowing and glittering like it’s full of stars. All the kind of awe-inspiring sights that your brain can’t quite believe actually exist until you see them yourself for the first time with your own eyes.

I slouched in my weathered deck chair, bourbon glass balanced on my knee, watching the sunset paint the sky over Fort Walton Beach in broad strokes of crimson and gold.

Above them, a ceiling of curdled light spanned the sky. It was a galaxy. It was a disc of stars, flatter and thinner than she might have expected, in proportion to its width no thicker than a few sheets of paper. She thought she could see strata in that disc, layers of structure, a central sheet of swarming blue stars and dust lanes sandwiched between dimmer, older stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disc like an egg yolk, was a compact mass of yellowish light; but it was not spherical, rather markedly elliptical. The spiral arms were fragmented. They were a delicate blue laced with ruby-red nebulae and the blue-white blaze of individual stars—a granularity of light—and with dark lanes traced between each arm. She saw scattered flashes of light, blisters of gas. Perhaps those were supernova explosions, creating bubbles of hot plasma hundreds of light-years across. But the familiar disc—shining core, spiral arms—was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim red stars. The crimson fireflies were gathered in great clusters, each of which must contain millions of stars.

You will hear thunder and remember me, / And think: she wanted storms. The rim / Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, / And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire. That day in Moscow, it will all come true, / when, for the last time, I take my leave, / And hasten to the heights that I have longed for, / Leaving my shadow still to be with you.

You will hear thunder and remember me, / And think: she wanted storms. The rim / Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson, / And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire. That day in Moscow, it will all come true, / when, for the last time, I take my leave, / And hasten to the heights that I have longed for, / Leaving my shadow still to be with you

From his attic of dreams, from his tower of ivory and spleen, the morose impressionist saw unrolling beneath him a double lane of light, tall poles, bearing twy-electric lamps, either side of nocturnal Madison Avenue, throwing patches of metallic blue upon the glistening damp pave - veritable fragments of shivering luminosity; saw the interminable stretch of humid asphalt stippled by rare notes of dull crimson; exigent lanterns of some fat citizen contractor. Occasional trolley-cars, projecting vivid shafts of canary colour into the mist, traversed with vertiginous speed and hollow thunder the dreary roadway. It was now midnight. On the street were buttresses of granite; at unryhthmic intervals gloomy apartment-houses reared to the clouds their oblong ugliness, attracting by their magnetism the vagrom winds which tease, agitate, and buffet unfortunate ones afoot in this melancholy cañon of marble, steam, and steel. A huge, belated, bug-like motor-car, its antennæ vibrating with fire, slipped tremulously through the casual pools of shadowed cross-lights; swam and hummed so softly that it might have been mistaken for a novel, timorous, amphibian monster, neither boat nor machine. To the faded nerves of the fantastic impressionist aloft in his ineluctable cage this undulating blur of blue and grey and frosty white, these ebon silhouettes of hushed brassy palaces, and the shimmering wet night did but evoke the exasperating tableau of a petrified Venice. Venice overtaken by a drought eternal; an aerial Venice with cliff-dwellers in lieu of harmonious gondoliers; a Venice of tarnished twilights, in which canals were transposed to the key of stone; across which trailed and dripped superficial rain from dusk and implacable skies; rain upright and scowling. And the soul of the poet ironically posed its own acid pessimism in the presence of this salty, chill, and cruel city — a Venice of receded seas, a spun-iron Venice, sans hope, sans faith, sans vision.

The Morpheus Market is basically right on the planet’s terminator line, directly between the Daylands and Shadowlands. It’s a striking visual contrast depending on where I look. To the west, there’s even more blinding brightness where the Passage becomes the Daylands, the sky going from semi-twilight obscured by sand to a brutal, nearly cloudless crimson. To the east, after the beautiful miasma of reds, yellows, and purples that is the eternal sunset, the Shadowlands loom—a line of dark, jagged peaks, partially cloaked by cloud cover, their accumulated snow and ice chaotically lit by an unnatural blue glow.

Lose yourself in the sunsets and drink into its melodies. Listen to the winds to know how crimson sky came down to whisper the sun's last farewell words to the earth.

Have you ever lost yourself in the sunset that washes the sky Of the day’s garish glory And paints crimson In the hour of blush? Have you ever sensed a poise in the busy life, where power and wealth lose their pride, for a human is called by the rosy mystery! Have you ever seen how the heart floats in the sky, Gently, gently over the clouds of worry, Into the westerly where colors splash, Where poems just begin, Where lovers get lost in the gaze. Have you ever seen how sunset Takes us to the other side of life, Where despairs die, and dreams are born, For therein lies a lover’s glance, In the sweetness and hunger To taste a cup of crimson.

As sunset falls and serenity fills that quiet hour of crimson, we sense God in the descending calm.

Antiseptic Awakening by Stewart Stafford See the rainbow spattered With dark blood moon juice. This creeping haemorrhage, A lacerated spectrum merged. Bruised trickles not halting, Violations in crimson stealth. Impotent, alleged lifeforms, Ashen foot-dragging below. Casually surrendered hues, The arterial strain's zenith. No colour in cheek nor sky, Bleached by antiseptic snow. © 2026, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

For a moment

It wasn’t just catching mackerel that made those dawns red-letter days for us. It was like watching the world being created anew to watch the sun come up -the orange streak changing to flames -orange, yellow, crimson; to watch the whole bay catch the glory of it – to watch the western sky take fire. People who don’t ever watch sunrises miss a lot of wonder.