‘I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.’
From ‘The Cloud’, in Prometheus Unbound (1820), by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
A volutus, or roll cloud, riding ahead of an arcus, or shelf cloud, within a storm system spotted by Kerry Krepps (Member 49,335) over Lee’s Summit, Missouri, US.