The cloud-capped towers #haibun #earthweal

Driving home from York as a child: it’s a long drive, nearly three hours. First you cross the Vale of York, then over Bowes Moor from Scotch Corner down into the Eden valley. It’s a lot of wide open spaces and even wider, open skies.

I can’t remember the time of year, though I’m guessing it was early spring because of the cloud formations gathering over the evening in crimson-tinted shrouds.

I spent the entire journey imagining myself up into that sky, where the billowing clouds were unimaginably tall mountains, and the sun-streaks below them a vast, mirror-calm sea. 

The cloud-capped towers
billowing bright otherworlds
into existence 

Written for earthweal

This is my second offering for Brendan’s Otherworld challenge, and it was inspired by another poem posted to that challenge, ‘waterline‘ by Lindi-Ann Hewitt-Coleman. Lindi writes of the liminal space between sky and reflective water. Which took me back to my imagined seas and mountains in the sky.

The photo is not from my childhood journey, but of a sunset over Strunjan, Slovenia earlier this year. And of course ‘the cloud-capped towers’ are from Shakespeare (The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1.)