Santa Semana (Holy Week) in a town on the northern Colombia coast was a rollicking good time. A joyful time.

Santa Marta is a hybrid of modern, boardwalk bustle melded with the slow nostalgia of a traditional colonial town.

El Centro, with its innate circus-ness, was our first stop. At our table on the main drag, amid the river of bobble-headed tourists and chattering restaurant hosts, we sipped Cuba Libres and marinated in the cacophony.

A quartet of boys set up along the wall and began to drum and sing with astonishing beauty; further down, an aging guitarist passionately played Vicente Fernández-style Journey covers on a blown-out amp.

After dinner, we joined the throngs on the malecon, the seaside promenade. The beach was a flood of space and light after the narrow maze of restaurants. Overhead, palm fronds rattled in the breeze, a dreamlike canopy for more “performers”—hawkers selling ice cream, elotes, jalapeño and lime popcorn, balloons, buckets of flowers, baggies of juice, cowboy boots, coca leaf drinks.

Everywhere you looked, things on sticks: fruit, candy, blinking lights, grilled meats.

Ladies selling empanadas out of bins. Friends duck-facing for selfies. Families rummaging through coolers. Couples nestled on the sand.

When night fell, we turned inland. A church stood in the hush of the plaza. Whitewashed, aglow from within, its halo of light spilled onto people milling in the street. Church-goers moved in and out of its open doors, a carousel of shadows pulsing in the candlelight, and from the muffled cavern of the sanctuary, a familiar, sonorous entreaty floated out. Hymns.

We turned onto an empty side street, where cats mewled in the dark and flags rustled furtively overhead, and all I could think of was what Anne Sexton wrote in 1959, after a stay in a mental institution,

“Music pours over the sense

and in a funny way

music sees more than I …

and that moon too bright

forking through the bars to stick me

with a singing in the head.

I have forgotten all the rest …

Oh, la la la,

this music swims back to me.”