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

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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.