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Likestarlings is a place for talking in poems. We pair poets with poets and they write a sequence of six new works by responding in turn to one another. Our palaver blog goes beyond poetry to discuss collaboration in theory and in practice. Please take a look, and feel free to add comments, opinions and suggestions here. Read poems 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!