Dawn in Pink

Dawn revealed herself this morning clothed in a luxurious pink. The moon was hovering in the south, a brilliantly white hemisphere and looking like a button in the clear blue sky. We know it to be an illusion; the moon looks so big to the eye, but to a camera it is just a small white dot. Then the sun began to emerge over Hartlebury Common, like a tiny segment of an irradiated orange, growing larger by the second. Within a few minutes the whole of the bright globe had appeared, the sky had become lighter by a significant degree, and the moon began to pale in the new light of day, but still hanging in the sky to watch the show. The clouds formed a wall along the western horizon, and nothing else in the sky but a few wisps that might have been vapour trails, but then again maybe a few sketch lines drawn by some unknown hand. When the rest of the dog-walkers joined me at ten past eight the show was over. By nine o’clock the sky had clouded over, the moon retired for the day, and the sun on it’s lazy journey to that low zenith it maintains so near the winter solstice.