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Vicci Bentley

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Cloud Nine

None of your fancy Latin; cirrus, nimbus, cumulus.
He’d bring the clouds down to earth
with what he knew.

Common names and country portents,
how they morphed into the familiar;
windswept mare’s tails, squalling mackerel,
blue sky cauliflower.

‘Red sky at night,’ he’d intone;
as low-level wads of cotton
staunched the last drops of a dying sun
healing rumours of rain:
his silver lining.

Kids grown, and flown away,
trailing vaporous, distant voices
diminished by the static of the once-a-month report.
‘What’s the weather like, there?’
Icarus, if he knew it, proved him right, fair and square.
‘What’s good enough for my father…’

But was there ever a sunset so inflamed,
that it blazed a ring around his vision,
a burning hoop to burst through?
And as he watched roosting flocks fling themselves like darts
across the smouldering plumes of sky –
did he dream that he could fly?

Vicci Bentley is a women’s magazine journalist who writes poetry for light relief.

Page(s) 46

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