Sarah Leavesley, a poet from Worcestershire, UK, recently sent us her latest poetryfilm. She tells us that clouds focus a lot in her life and work as inspiration for her writing and photography and also as part of her personal, mindful and meditation practices.

Her cumuli collector

He told her clouds were washed shadows
sucked up from the land; once the sky
spun and tumbled them, even the ugliest
frothed white and fluffy. Fresh. Sunlit.

They joked about the taste of soap suds
on candyfloss, then searched for sheep,
polar bears and strange snow cats.
Dark angels flew the thunderclouds.

That winter, they watched the changing flocks
above them, the shift and drift of night and day.
When at last they kissed, he sucked out
the darkness within her, exhaling a white

mist on cold air – frostlike but sparkling.
Their eyes shone with light, and silver linings
tumbled from his gaze to hers. Horizons
lifted clear from home’s ghosted valleys.

The day he left, not a single wisp of white
or grey against the bright blue sky.
But it rained non-stop inside her: heavy,
pounding – the rain of dark angels.

© Sarah Leavesley
(From How to Grow Matches, Against The Grain Press, 2018)