Today’s poem for Paul Brookes’ challenge. You can see the images here.

Wondering

beyond this dull day
of coming winter, parched grass
still brown, browner leaves fallen,
to the times when spring will not heal
this cracked and broken land,
blood and sap no longer course, rise,
bones snap like brittle branches.

When the earth sighs,
the life that once teemed dies,
will clouds still roll across the skies
in battleship grey like today?

Wondering,
for a thousand billion friends.

For Paul Brookes’ challenge. You can see the photos here.

The uncertainty of clouds

They are fickle, the clouds, speaking
languages that change from day to day.
The sky is all some of us have,
especially on days when the world is mute
and dumb and indifferent.

I watch Manannán’s horses tread white,
scattering foam from their manes,
hooves scraping, then watch the light sabre
cut across their path, chop them
into a flock of docile sheep.

They call first in the ancient tongue
that echoes across green hills,
then in the alien clicking of electronics,
dials and meters. I lose the thread,
the drift, all out at sea.

I wish not for stability,
for who ever heard of a stationary cloud?
But for the story to be told to the end,
before they break into another darker tale,
before the failing of the light.