CLOUD AND LINEN by Ramey Channell

WELL DONE! Poetry

CLOUD AND LINEN by Ramey Channell

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, drowning,

whose dreams were mists of half remembered flight.

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 only one frozen winter,

but there were many, many summers

of hydrangeas

fragile

living blue for water.

Ramey Channell, award winning Alabama author, poet, and artist, is the author of three novels: Sweet Music on Moonlight Ridge (2010) The Witches of Moonlight Ridge (2016) and The Treasure of Moonlight Ridge (2021). Her children’s picture book, written and illustrated by Ramey, is Mice from the Planet Zimlac (2021), also available in a French edition, Les Souriceaux de la Planete Zimlac (2022), translated by Alexandrine Duteil Stebach. Ramey’s poems and stories have been published by Aura Literary Arts Review, Alabama State Poetry Society, Birmingham Arts Journal, Alalitcom, Ordinary and Sacred as Blood: Alabama Women Speak (1999), Belles Letters 2: Contemporary Stories by Alabama Women (2017) Stormy Pieces: A Mobile Writers Guild Anthology (2021), and many other journals and collections. She is currently working on her fourth southern fiction novel in the Moonlight Ridge Series.