Musings On Clouds Poem by Hugh Cobb

Clouds evoke images:
perceptions shift with interplay
of wind, light and shadow.
Forms emerge, fade - mirages
in a landscape of airborne ice.
Look closely.
One might perceive old gods
peering through eternity
at a world that has long forgotten them
or angels battling demons
across azure panoramas.

Riding beams of wind and light.
clouds exist entirely in the Now.
Knowing change to be intrinsic, inherent
and constant. Remaining unconcerned
with past or future, they simply are.

Delighting in their cloudness
in brilliant sunlight or cool dispassionate moonlight,
they draw moisture into expanding gossamer bellies
only to release their nurturing stores
to fauna and flora of patient earth,
replenishing rivers, streams, and oceans
wild and filled with exotic life.

Rife with life and its sustenance,
clouds gladly surrender their very beings.
Low hanging and ground clouds
hug earth in the guises of fog and mists -
create breathtaking vistas surrounding
familiar objects, making them vanish trompe l'oeil -
transforming the viewed known with mystery and
a real sense of the numinous: They surround
mountain peaks; move serpentine over rivers
and streams; slither among trees, forests and fields
only to evaporate as sun emerges
as if they had never existed at all.

Clouds' greatest and most secret joy
is a sudden passage of birds:
the startling explosion of wings.