Cloud and Linen

We were hydrangeas   

living blue for water.

We were angels; our faces

shattered sunlight into halos.

We were suns too bright 

and moons too pale

to fill the tragic universe of time.

And left lonely by day

and lonely by night,

we danced not joyfully 

but like drifting flowers 

on a shoreless sea.

We were cloud and linen.

We were flightless birds whose dreams

were mists of half remembered flight.

Drowning. How did we even breathe?

Or did we ever breathe?

I can’t remember breathing.

We were resplendent microscopic fruit,

as seasons turned 

and traveled on without us.

We were too frail to follow seasons 

as they flew away

and left us, abandoned under trees.

We were melancholy strains of music.

Our hands were always empty,

and we always thought

somehow we’d find a way

to fill our empty hands, with dreams,

with sky, with all that we had lost.

Hydrangeas in summer

dancing under water,

we yearned for air.

I remember now:

we were flightless birds

with half remembered dreams of flight.

I don’t know what we were.

We were cloud and linen.

We were sand and clay and grass in summer;

we were ice and broken trees in winter.

There was one frozen winter

but there were many, many summers

of hydrangeas

fragile

living blue for water.

-Ramey Channell