This was the eighth piece of music to arrive from Annie (of nine) but the very last lyric to be written.  I found the melody line to be so evocative of something fragile and sylvan that I really wanted to write something that would do it justice, but unusually even after several listenings, nothing would come.

So I shelved it for a few weeks while I continued with Annie’s final track.  When I eventually returned to it, the first line came to me immediately.  It conjured an image of the fragile Earth orbiting in the vast blackness of space:

 

Sapphire of the skies, alone she flies through the dark

This was exactly what I’d been searching for.  The story of the song, how the Earth is all we have to protect us from that blackness and how our mistreatment of it could so easily result in its destruction, followed naturally from that first line.

 

 

Sapphire of the skies, alone she flies, through the dark
Holding all our hopes and all our fears
Sunlight on a stream, is this a dream in the park
Waking to the day it disappears

Black clouds are before you, all poison and hate
Bleed the blue to ghostly gray

This is all we have and still you laugh at the night
Time is tripping by and you’re the fool
Step back from the brink now, please open your eyes
Bright the flame before it dies

Sapphire of the skies, with us she flies, through the dark
Healing all our scars and all our pain
I believe in love, and when the dove of our ark
Leads us to a clearing after rain
No clouds in the future to cover the sun
Gaia will survive the storm
Gaia will survive

itunesnow
Beresford & Wallace: Weird and Wonderful
Beresford & Wallace: Suburban Nostalgia