[Tanka] Absorbing all the long lingering heat of this summer, the copper-colored clouds vanish at the autumn equinox

September 22nd (Sun) was the Autumnal Equinox.
It was a day when the intense heat finally subsided a little. It had been raining past noon, but by evening the rain stopped, and a high, autumnal sky with clouds appeared.

After cooling off on the balcony just past 5:30 PM, I returned to the kitchen to make dinner. When I happened to glance outside, I noticed that the sky, which had been light blue or bluish-gray until just a moment ago, was beginning to dye itself in shades of pink and madder red.

When I went out to the balcony again, the sky and clouds were dyed in vivid orange and tangerine colors. Can the sky and clouds really change color this much in just a few minutes? I am amazed by the workings of nature.

Clouds of various colors—vermilion, orange, pale purple, and tangerine—are cloaked in a divinity that looks almost like an aurora.

I was momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer beauty, solemnity, divinity, and mystery of it all.

I went outside to see it from a different angle. In just about a minute, the sky, the clouds, their shapes, and their colors were all changing rapidly.

The orange and tangerine colors from a moment ago are changing into madder red, purple, ultramarine, rust, dark reddish-brown, and persimmon colors—no, no matter what words I try to use, I cannot seem to express those colors.

As I gazed at the clouds for a while, they gradually began to look like lava. Yes, they look very much like the lava overflowing from a crater, flowing while beginning to harden.

The clouds also look like rising flames.

In about 10 minutes, the sunset faded away, and a curtain fell over the city.

It was a truly wonderful, indescribable, magnificent sunset.
It was a sunset so beautiful, powerful, warm, cool, and moving.

The copper-colored clouds seemed to be absorbing the hot energy of the magma's swell and the flames. As if they were gathering up all the long, long intense heat and lingering summer heat of this summer at once, taking it all in, and carrying it away into the twilight of the autumn equinox to vanish.

It seems it will get much cooler starting tomorrow.

Eisuke Nekoma