Clouds, With Poetic Gleanings Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Clouds keep changing shapes, resisting outlines.
That proverb about clouds with silver linings
Is simply fanciful, though Milton used it in ‘Comus',
Where he thought he saw "a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night".
A cloud may show a ragged edge like a bandage.
Clouds can be like mammoths, crocodiles,
Prophets in disgrace, continents adrift.
Sanskrit poet Kalidasa conjured a Cloud Messenger
To carry a captive's ardent love poem to a spouse,
Far away in the Himalaya.
A Christian mystic seven centuries ago
Wrote ‘The Cloud of Unknowing', which I sense
From my own libraries of ignorance.
Clouds can be moon-drape, blankets, P.B. Shelley,
Or prompt Wordsworth as a lonely wanderer
In lake-embedded highlands to think of daffodils.

Sometimes they abdicate all form
And symbolise "a high romance";
How sad that John Keats died young,
But at least his sonnet survives. I wish he knew this
Before his pen had ‘ceased to be'.

Black clouds that come wafting in the summer,
Hinting at a promise to the parched land,
Are welcome to take over the sky,
Even if they belie our lamented hopes
Of torrents and abundant rain.