This year I'm looking up, and considering the sky. A daily moment of looking beyond myself... but also finding myself in the words spun out of the clouds.
A new year and a blue sky…mostly blue, mostly new…
We carry everything we are over from one year to the next, so how come we expect the new year to be different from the old one? And why overburden ourselves with a whole load more to-do stuff?
To look more skywards is my only resolution for this coming year. To look and to wonder and to see what comes of both. We are like the clouds, ever changing and yet ever constant. Flowing into lightness and consolidating into the dark. Dancing in the blue or hiding the light and storming across the sky. On a new year's blue-sky day, I find hope for a year in which the light outweighs the storms, and a trust that we'll handle whichever we have to deal with.
Under a sullen sky
Mizzle that can't stir itself to rain
Seeps through soaking, infiltrating
And leaves you sodden just the same
Pocket letters dripping, disintegrating
Unposted now, you'll need to write again
I'd come to believe that every sky was interesting, did we but pause long enough to linger, to look and see its differentiation. Soon enough there came a day to prove me wrong, a day in which the sky scarcely ease from dark to unremitting grey with ne'er a breach nor a break and so back to dusk and dark again. On such a day it takes the intervening lens of a photograph to show that even here, behind the spectral trees, the sky has its shading from white to violet blue – not near so grey as it seemed to my naked eye.
In the greys and whites of winter skies
Focussing
Trying to find the beginnings, the skeins
Of a dream
Yet to be woven.
Shapeless, formless,
Yet.
Moving pictures, reflections
Shifting clouds,
and other skies
through other windows
A hint of early sky, hidden
Tree branches grasping darkly
At candy-floss clouds
Teasingly pink, hinting
At what might lie beyond
This hotel window
Geese flying over the Norfolk coast, sky-writing in an alphabet ghost
What letters are these, words, or meaning
Honking calls echoing
Out to sea
When all you see is a dark sky
Through a glass
Darkly
Hemmed in by buildings high
Cloistering life
Starkly
What then…?
On tiny wings, insignificant
We fly towards an imagined sea
Cloud-bank hills indistinct
Sky-not-land scapes
Future free
