Friday 29 May 2020

Triggered by Cloud













On fire in a high sky,
sunlight vaguely filtered,
sliding down, attenuated,
my eyes' pointed staring,
my reminder of a face;

shape alone sparked
the memory of a childhood
dead to the world, still alive
in grey synapses beneath
my withered hair.

This weather was all
that my life had been:
cold fronts and occlusions,
banked cumulus, my torn stratus
wisped with pannus, squall upon squall
in the face of my imagined ageing.

Noctilucent to the last,
after sundown in the west,
red with shame,
and the early summer light
persisting,
even when I went aching to bed,
aching with memory and thunderheads,
and time’s insubstantial mist falling
until my landscapes merged.

Clouds, like my invented gods,
transubstantiated the earthly heart
to a place of moisture,
condensed what I thought
into wild ideas
where tomorrow shone
as clear as now, 
as real as this hand before 
my bewildered face.

Always blue behind:
the afterwards of better days
left hints of sky,
light turned to pigment,
no longer an illusion;
then came infant rain,
embryo drops dancing like angels
on pinhead atoms of air
and the breath of elsewhere
rolling, front by front,
in weather systems
of torrential change;

these were the clouds I understood
as they wrapped around
my moments.
© BH, 2020

Another challenge. XR Poets, again. ‘Clouds’ the word to start with.

I like these challenges because they force the starting point on you. Of course, not all of them inspire even a word but out of the connecting moment, sometimes, as this poem might suggest, something unexpected is triggered.

Now extensively edited.

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