Cloud Tracks

Photo and poem by Shereen Rana

To think the years passed under all this, over and over—

each era is a cycle under the same mirror. 

See there: a childhood's end. 

And growing gives you more space in your palms to feel the quiet canvas. 

The clouds are worlds deep.

No heating point in this heart, no heart, a breathed hope dissolving the sky. 

A tossing of air, unwrapping of starlight. 

The clouds care very little for fingerprints. They barely see us.

And then there’s the way the bird doesn’t know of its bones,

but they heal. 

The threaded life pulsing—the life itself silent, 

taking a minute. No-one 

counting it down. Minutes bury themselves,

anyway, with the belief more primitive than beauty.

Something more like a waterfall’s tail caught in sunlight—

metal alight. Clouds alight, soft furnaces. 

So when and where do waterfalls end 

and flesh starts? Do clouds think of that? 

(A rain of molten glass 

wiped the dinosaurs out.

Cosmos’ mouth and trigger. The single meteor melted 

and we stole its tragedy 

from the sky, a breath at a time. The rain, it sinks too deep.) 

Still, there are colours. Some had twisted, stretched, 

kept secrets. If you don’t look too close

you’d be lucky enough to see their locks, 

a folded up dream. Clouded.

Haunted by the clocks,

timeless ghosts. 

Religion was there in a lonesome body. Lonesome and trusting.

There was also the only firelight 

the birds wanted to see: the sun’s depths. 

The revolving colours—shades of yellow and orange, grey whistling and rain 

falling flat—a song in the world of vacuum 

and mid-sentence. Pink and red outlining the full truth.

The colours, teary, I dove through, moving, 

moved.