for TS Eliot

Cloud burst, and another sky falls. A blight of sun causes all feather to lose flavour in the wind. But our children will still have their mobile phones and dial the clouds in angst of predator drones. The crows are gone and broken windows only catch the breaths of dying trees. No matter how sorry the horizon, a child’s foresight will always wonder of the beauty in a falling sky.

‘Look Mumma … a death bird!’

But Mumma doesn’t look at the sky since it has soured. Mumma takes a peg and pins a damp sheet to the flimsy clothes hoist. Mumma counts the kinks in the wire and measures her own life – line.

‘Mumma can’t look now baby,
there may not be any sunlight tomorrow …’

And then Mumma takes the small child inside their shelter, abandoning the weathered fabric to subtly dance alone; it could be tomorrow’s death shroud?
And this is the way the world ends,
And this is the way the world ends,
And this is the way the world ends.
As the clouds quietly burst,
Not with bang, but a lethal breeze.

The sky is falling,
ghosts take shelter in shadow
and the air cries foul …