Nimbus

Solid from above, they look so solid, 
As if one could step onto them and sink

In gently like on top of a quilt, and not fall through.
And still, they look so still, as if fixed in space,

A permanent feature to offset the china-blue
Sky, just another one of God's aesthetic effects.  But

We know they're not like that.  We watch them
Shift and change, merge and descend, restless they

Evaporate, simply disappear into thin air.  They often leave
Behind them threads of mist like an imaginative thought that

Rises for a second before withdraws into the dark back
Onto that spool from whence it spilled.

And below on the land there are scars.  Our hills are
Gouged, our fields ploughed-up, our woodlands flat

For motorways; and hedgerows, trees, just disappear 
As if they never did exist pre-us; and all the flocks 

Just go, edged-out as our cities rust the landscape,
Junk the green, swallow the living.

And in our minds, caught between the soft and the hard,
Between ever-shifting, ever-changing 

Impressions of what we think we see, believe we know, 
Between our restlessness, our quest for spirit, sanity, 

For vestiges of hope left to scrape from the surface
Of our days, 

Can we see past the daze of blue and white above, the beauty
That is free?  Through the sun's flame, beyond the world's money,

Can we catch the spark from where the start began?  
Over all those noisy black and narrow cityscapes 

Can we still hear grass grow, the worm burrow?  
And can we see beneath the board all the wires, the

Connections of sense that lock it all together into
One whole scheme - or is this time, this too-late 

Hour so powerful that it renders each of us so 
Dull, so

Lethargic, so 
Stuffed with rubbish that there is no 

Nimbus left to line our eyes with gold, no
Decent skin?  We do not question as we should.  

Such saturation of modern myths, those lies they tell, 
Those spurious truths, forcefeed us

Our bleary eyes, 
Our clouded minds, 

Our acceptance of so little.
And us too far below all the layers of our own detrius

To see that truth.

previous poem