Cloudy, With a Chance of Poetry

 

"Clouds are all sorts. They are a medium of revelation, through which the gods show themselves. They're a playground for human imagination, where we can see any number of forms and creatures ("Very like a whale!"). They are mood music, the emotional backdrop to a scene. They are complex natural phenomena, which challenge our capacity for accurate observation..." - On Constable's Study of Clouds, The Independent 

I love clouds. They're gaze inspiring. Cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, all of them are fascinating to my sky-trailing eyes. Many's a day can be spent wiled away watching them. Many's a thought has taken on new dimensions in their presence. Many's an imagination that has been carried away into seeing animals and shapes in them.

Yep, clouds are cool. So magnificent and so ordinary, taken for granted, yet marvelled at when we really ponder them. 

On that note then, here are a few poems I was delighted to come across that marvel and wonder and woo, with their witty sentiments on clouds. Especially Billy Collins' offerings, imaginer extraordinaire. 

Enjoy fellow cloud/poetry lovers!

~ Siobhán

(*Previous posts on clouds: Cloud Contemplation)



Student of Clouds - Billy Collins

The emotion is to be found in clouds,
not in the green solids of the sloping hills
or even in the gray signatures of rivers,
according to Constable,who was a student of clouds
and filled shelves of notebooks with their motion,
their lofty gesturing and sudden implication of weather.

Outdoor, he must have looked up thousands of times,
his pencil trying to keep pace with their high voyaging
and the silent commotion of the eddying and flow.
Clouds would move beyond the outlines he would draw
as they moved within themselves, tumbling into their centers
and swirling off at the burning edges in vapors
to dissipate into the universal blue of the sky.

In photographs we can stop all this movement now
long enough to tag them with their Latin names.
Cirrus, nimbus, stratocumulus -
dizzying, romantic, authoritarian -
they bear their titles over the schoolhouses below
where their shapes and meanings are memorized.

High on the soft blue canvases of Constable
they are stuck in pigment but his clouds appear
to be moving still in the wind of his brush,
inching out of England and the nineteenth century
and sailing over these meadows where I am walking,
bareheaded beneath the cupola of motion,
my thoughts arranged like paint on a high blue ceiling.

*(See Constable's study of clouds here and pict above)

Clouds - Christina Rossetti

White sheep, white sheep,
On a blue hill,
When the wind stops
You all stand still
When the wind blows
You walk away slow.
White sheep, white sheep,
Where do you go?





Clouds - Wislawa Szymborska

I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds -
a split second’s enough
for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind,
they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to?
They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds,
life rests on solid ground,
practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother,
someone you can trust,
while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply don't care
what they're up to
down there.

And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole life
and mine, still incomplete.

They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone.
They don't have to be seen while sailing on.

 

The Biography of a Cloud - Billy Collins

It would have been easier to folllow Johnson 
from pub to pub with a notebook and pen
or sift through cardboard boxes
crammed with Trollopiana
than to tell the story of this anonymous mass.

It is hard to say even where it was born
though considering its thick, whipped texture
and its lofty, processional manner,
I have it somewhere over a large warm body of
water,
fathered by heat, mothered by humidity.

We do know this much:
that it billowed white at the mountainous top
and its flat underside was the grey of headstones;
that it slid onto the land and felt its way
over the contours of several western states, 
always moving eastward, from left to right
the way eyes move over print
as if it were reading the earth with its blind shadow. 

Otherwise, it did nothing
but allow itself to be blown through the high cold 
atmosphere,
though it was always changing shapes
and assumed in its lifetime the form
of Australia, the head of an enormous dog,
a sheep on the run, a hippo with its mouth agape, 
and even the camel that passed through the eye of Hamlet. 

As usual, its existence was noted by only a few: 
a workman eating lunch on a girder,
a woman on a terrace watering plants, 
and a large number of people named Riley,
all supine in hammocks or on blankets spread for picnics. 

Ordinarily it travelled in a convoy
or pedalled along with one or two companions,
but early one morning over Arizona
it held the distinction of being the only one in the sky. 

In the end, it died as all clouds do,
in an obscurity befitting one of the minor English poets,
the son of a London hatter or an Essex clergyman,
sent down from Oxford for heresy or gambling, 
soon addicted to laudanum, then the slide into destitution
for their stories, too, begin to sound alike. 

But I would rather track the life of a cloud
than labour over packets of letters
written in a crabbed hand
or explicate the four sorry volumes of verse
he would have left when he died,
gout-ridden on a cot in Wembley. 

I prefer a wayside bench, ensnared by vines,
to the dark aisles of a library,
a place to watch them inch across the sky, 
caravans plying their ancient trade routes. 
I want to train my scholar's eye
on the bright shifting edges
where the weightless tonnes of clouds lick the air.
I want to remove my hat, close my eyes, 
and feel the sun, warm and intermittent, on my face.