Poem: "Cloudshadow"
This poem came out of the August 6, 2013 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from Dreamwidth user Timescaper. It has been sponsored from the general fund.
Cloudshadow
The rainbringer wanders
from place to place because
the rain follows him
like a dark horse on a long rein.
Everywhere he goes,
he is always, always
trailed by the rain.
The people are fickle
in their reception of his presence --
usually tolerant, occasionally grateful
to the point of weeping like clouds themselves,
sometimes so bitterly hateful
that they try to drive him away with thrown stones.
It is no wonder
that often he does not tell them
of the connection between his arrival and the rain,
but if he stays, so does the water,
and sooner or later someone makes the connection
between stranger and storm.
He feels their joys and their frustrations
about having or not having the rain on a given day,
or for days on end if he stays,
knowing the drought may not break
if he stays away.
These feelings are around him
but not of him,
for the cloudshadow cannot settle
and belong to one village, one people, one place.
Like the rain dogging his heels,
he must always move, and move again,
trailing hopes and regrets like drops of water, because
if he doesn't move,
he never sees the sun.