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TODAY THE SKY
is a bowl of palest chalky blue. Strange, how it seems always that I am at the
exact centre of it. I can walk or fly for hours; horizons still equidistant
stretch away from me. Only the changing of the clouds leads my eye to believe
in time and distance past.
Today the clouds are the finest filigree of delicate swirls, the lightest touch
of pale and downy feathers: strewn unremarked, casually, by the interactions of
air and water and the mountains of the earth that push and pull the flows. The
flows of heat: spirit of faraway fire that warms and convects and dominates our
lives with its nuclear whiteheat deaththroes. No mortal hand could sketch this
drifting complexity in its chaotic, infinite detail. There are no pigments to
match the subtle shading. And I have no words to tell you of all the joy and
sorrow I see under this arc of dreamy blue.
Today I see the sunlight glinting off the white wings of the sailplanes as they
bank and frolic, taking advantage of an untypical December day. For the joy of
wings and sky they play beneath the wispy high clouds.
There are men at the edge of the wood across the field. They are dressed in thick
tweed-patterned country coats and green rubber boots. They bear twelvebores, and
shoot iridescent-plumed birds down from the bluewhite sky.
Above the men, above the birds, above the sailplanes, I see the straight,
menacingly purposeful contrails of the military jets, so silent-high above us.
If there is something higher yet, I see it not with my weak eyes. Nor could I
say, if it would be there in play.
Oh sky, th'art beautiful. And though full of death, th'art beautiful. To both
the hunter and the hunted, that beauty is clear.
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