Member Poem

He carried a cloud with him, so thick
that when we tried to pierce it
with little spears of laughter
they came back blunted, broken.
There was no evading it.
Inside that house
the cloud pervaded everything,
made raindrops on my mother’s cheeks
brought shadows into sunlit space.
We crept around as if through fog,
afraid of what we might stumble into,
or hid in upstairs rooms
that slowly filled with cloudlets of our own.
If he went out, the cloud and I would follow.
There was a hill on which, after a while
you might just see a little sun upon his face.
There is nothing like the wind, for shifting clouds

Published in The Lake