Visuals

I love writing in part because of the visuals that are so amazingly powerful in poetry.

Recently, at Poetic Bloomings, we had a prompt that involved clouds. Coincidentally, that morning I had a visual as I pulled out of my driveway and faced the eastern sky. A mountain range had suddenly appeared overnight. This prompted, of course, a poem that began, then formed in my mind, and later after the prompt, begged to be finished.

Mountain Clouds

This morning
I awoke with geographic wonder
as I saw
on the morning’s edges far away and yonder
mountains that had not been there before this day.
A gasp escaped.

My heart gave way
to such a thought that in the night
a smoky ridge had risen as

a dare to sky,
a dare to rock and earth,
a dare to eons, eras, time.

And then a golden slice of sun broke through
down and below this new and undulated smoky ridge.
And then, just then, I saw the peaks were but,
alas,
a bank of clouds that trailed a weather front,
a blanket turned down
off of slumbering sky as she awoke.

I sighed.
I would have welcomed such
new mountains in my world,
even if
they seemed so far,
so far,
away.

© Damon Dean, 2023