CLOUDS & TREES

 

 

 

 

Consider the wild transcendence of clouds:
Painting the sky as long as light allows,
Blown above us on the wind’s holy breath,
Sublime as the stars ranged above the earth;
Each one as abstract, fluid and mixed
As every star appears eternal and fixed.
From high cirrus, through rolling cumulus
To horizon’s far-following stratus,
Clouds change every day, blazing in the dawn,
Glowing in the dusk, always weatherworn,
Carrying rain that feeds the crops and trees;
Making with sea and sunlight that which frees
The energy of life to fire and surge and whirl
Through everything waking in the wuthering world.

Ponder now the perfectly evolved tree
In all its casual, ancient beauty:
In avenues, gardens, fields and mountains,
Its bare bark flowing into green fountains.
From rainforest to municipal park,
Exhaling oxygen through day and dark,
Each one its own world, there to resurrect
An Eden for blossom, bird and insect.
Processing life and leaf through birth and time,
Passing through childhood and youth into prime,
Down old age and death to rise in rebirth,
Blown above us in the wind’s holy breath;
And when the certain time arrives that we must cease,
Then lay us under the clouds and amongst the trees.

(2012)

I’d been wanting to write a poem about trees for a long time, but I didn’t know that when it came, it would have to share the bill with clouds.

One of those that ‘wrote itself’ quite quickly, though I laboured long over a handful of words and phrases here and there. The picture is another one taken in our back garden.