Cloud Exploding Over Ottery
A cloud like this in the bluest skies of a calm day
explodes in the most pervasive silence; that it erupts too
makes this a Thesaurus of the Cumulus. As it has not
begun in fire, the darkness that disperses becomes ashen.
A controlled experiment on the dynamics of an ignited
cloud has no abstract for its delineation – it is the seed of
an idea waiting for a proverbial wayward scientist.
While some are precursors to other types, this formation
is exponential like a muse, and the odes and elegies will
be beautiful tall tales.
Autumn Leaves
What theme are you expecting: seasonal wistfulness /
diminution / old age / The Virus? It’s a Clapton blues,
yet not his song, though love and loss, yes, but
symptomatic of another slowing down: symptomatic –
there’s the rub, or oil and grit, take your pick, but not in
the fall, one after the other – that’s not it at all. There is
the irony too of writing this on a day in May, sun
shining, and imminent expectation of a lockdown
lightening, not that people my age want this. The wheel
turns full circle.
If Coleridge Had Driven a Morris Minor
With beauty seen as a unity in multiplicity, Samuel
would have approved its mass production, warmed to the
Germanic influence of design – a Kantian love for this
aesthetics of simplicity in the sublime – and the
Englishness of tradition with innovation: like verse that
rhymes before a run of mimesis along an assembly line.
A ‘53 phase II could have a top to put down, composing
in the passing air as if on a long poet’s stride.
Independence was in the suspension of disbelief –
because it simply was – and rack and pinion steered like
a flight of poetic feathers on the thrust of wings: STC’s
journey to the divine.
Mike Ferguson is an American permanently resident in the UK. His latest publication is a collection of poems on teaching and education 'Drawing on Previous Learning' (Wrecking Ball Press, 2021)