A friend, Nicola Slee, wrote this poem in 1993, and I set it for unaccompanied SATB in 1996. It is a challenging sing, the trick being, not only to get the chromatic intervals correctly, but to find an effective balance between, on the one hand, stillness in which the work is embedded and from which it emerges, and, on the other, moving the piece forward to its final home.