In 2020, Canadian musician and poet Paul Grindlay published “Natural Selections“, an anthology of his poetry. A few years later, Paul gave me a copy and invited me to choose any poem to set for a choir to sing. I knew that he was ill at the time, but I had no idea just how ill he was. I selected my top three or four poems and contacted him to discuss ideas. It was only then that I learned that he had entered palliative care. A week before he passed, Paul asked me to set “Aurora Borealis“.
Since it has not been performed by a choir yet, here is a computer-generated mock-up using digitized voices:
© 2026 D. Geoffrey Bell
