Faith Teutschbein

Grade: 11

Bay Village High School

Instructor: Erin Beirne

Floating

Poetry

Floating

The stars, the sky, the clouds.
Maybe only this cloud
shifting through the sky,
the same as all of its brothers
the sun -burning- through its delicate wisps
strong enough to withstand the winds blowing from the North
always changing, crawling across the ever darkening and brightening sky
an endless cycle,
always the same.
Yet this one cloud
will always be
evolving,
drifting,
merging
with those around it.
Its active contours illuminated by the
shimmering and yearning sun.

This cloud-
condemned when too dense,
full of water and grief,
scorned when it decides to let all of this mourning
fall to the ground or
when it embezzles the sunlight that does not belong to it.
Yet awarded when the sun is too bright,
when it must take the brunt of its heat-
when skin erupts with dew-
and a moment of -cloudiness- is craved
like moisture on a shriveling tongue-
when the clouds shield us from fire,
only allowing us the sides of themselves that aren't smoldering to ashes.

Stillness is not a state my being has ever found itself in.
Yet I've learned how to find peace in the shifting.
How to relish the novelty, bask in the flow of time,
the way it refuses to pause
for even a moment,
whisking us all away with it.
I have learned how to shape myself into a form
of which others can imagine anything.
Learned how to consider, how to gaze
into the sky, how to worship all this elegance,
how to dream and empathize, how to dissolve
into a flowing contradiction.
We are all clouds,
ethereal and divine.
A collection of matter attracted to itself through space and time.
Waxing and infinite.
A poem.
A dream.
A synonym.
Floating and shifting
and all the
same.
Everything
and
nothing
all at once.