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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems and pictures. We pair poets with poets and photographers with photographers. Each pair produces a sequence of new works responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry and photography to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice in a wide range of places. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems here, look at photographs here.
 

Cloud


Where once there were twites and meadow pipits,

Peeping in passing, today in damp silence

Cumulus cloud presses down like a pillow

On the upturned face of the heathery hill.

Sometimes the air is lucid and one sees

The town spread on either side of the river

Like the barbs on the rachis of a feather,

Ripe for preening by some almighty bill.


Its belfries and steeples, tailored to advertise

The presence of a living God, lift up

Their long bony fingers into a void

Abandoned by despairing seraphim.

But now the mist enfolds me like a duvet –

As comforter, incubator of fantasy,

Also protector from the Evil Eye.

My vision's gathered in a veil of scrim.


If this is a preview of the afterlife,

It passes quickly and the spiky city

Reasserts itself'; below is the river

Over which herring gulls shamelessly yell

While circling slowly in figures of eight.

Mute swans drift with all the time in the world

And the citizens stare at the hills, crying

Look, look, the cloud has lifted, all will be well!