We were playing that game though I don’t think either of us made a conscious decision to start it. You just said ‘look at that hamster shaped cloud’ and I said ‘it looks more like a raccoon’ and you said I had no idea what a raccoon looked like and I said ‘probably not like a hamster’ and so on. And you then said ‘hey there’s a hole in the clouds just like a heart’ and I snapped it on my mobile. I’m sure you’ve played this kind of game many times. We sat for a while quitely watching the ever changing cloudscape move across the sky. Suddenly I said ‘look there’s a dragon’, and there it was the most perfect cloud dragon you could ever imagine stretched out across the sky as far as you could see. It reached out its claws to grasp at the sun and then in a few seconds it lost its form completely but for a second or two it was the perfect dragon.
I asked you if you had seen it and you did not answer me at first then at last you turned to me and told me with a smile that it was the most perfect cloud dragon you had ever seen. ‘I shall write a poem about it’, I said. ‘You will never capture its true beauty and perfection’ you warned. ‘I shall not have to’, I said, ‘because you have seen it too and therefore its beauty and perfection has already been captured and my poem shall merely remind us of what has been’. You said that this was ‘fair enough’ and that if I wanted to write a poem to mark the occasion then to ‘go right ahead’.
So I sat down elsewhere and tried to write a poem that would do justice to that cloud dragon; a dragon that had stretched in silvery white beauty and perfection across the clear blue sky only fading at last as it grasped at the fiery ball of the sun. I realised that I had reached the limit of my descriptive powers when faced with such a task of describing the real and imagined. The image in my brain refused to be painted well enough, in words worthy enough, to convey its true beauty and utter magnificence. No matter how hard I tried I could not reach the standard I had set myself. I finally gave up in frustration at my own weakness and came back and sat beside you again a little deflated. We sat there together watching the sun slowly sinking towards the sea and we remembered the wonder of the cloud dragon.
Finally, you asked me about my poem and I told you that the memory of that cloud dragon we shared was, as it turned out, too precious to put down in words and you told me that that was what you had been wisely thinking when you warned me. Just then you looked up and said, ‘look at that silver badger’, forcing me to look up at the now cloudless sky. ‘Not fair, there aren’t any clouds!’, I exclaimed and you said ‘Oh, it must be hiding’ and kicked me playfully. I then had to talk to you in mock seriousness about the rules of the game until you decided it was time for tea and I agreed and you said ‘come on you big lump let’s put the kettle on’ and I said ‘good idea’.
Yes unspoken thank you
Comment by Ian — 9, February 2009 @ 11:21 pm