Professor Gordon Thompson (retired), shared his poem “Drifting Memories of Sheer Delight”. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Image Credit: Edward Murphy – Cirrocumulus floccus undulatus during sunset over Vermontville, Adirondacks, New York, US
Drifting Memories of Sheer Delight
On a flight toward paradise
held amid white fluffs,
—like Archangels or lesser ones—
And hovering over the creator’s crawling kind
though born wingless,
we leap now through, over, out and above
lower stratus billows
to where our aspirations shine and glow
without duck down or glue, but steel
we dart nimbly through floating water
toward our waiting star—its light a beam
from the far side of frothy bright caps—
monuments to our ambitions.
we roar mutedly over bubbly stuff
laid down like a god’s carpet to salute
our way of life and it’s rocky wandering road
while thousands of miles higher
the arched peaks of cumulonimbus
—warlike cathedrals–mount—seemingly—
to ward off mankind’s dreams.
Anvil-like Principalities tower here
as mountainous Seraphim might
to shape a dome for the firmament
as they nimbly embrace the residue
of a truant breeze of hot gas rising
from the whispery or unspoken pledges
of the earth bound seeking this more rarefied
air at the threshold of our soul’s aspirations
There, like sentinels, wispy cirrocumulus
streak across the stratosphere
aping Thrones and Dominions
to bar our youthful exuberance–
conceits that waft like mementos
or the lingering breath of old men
soon to be buried, but not forgotten
like those butterflies of my youth
that fluttered into a blue oblivion.
© G. Thompson, Jan ‘24
