‘To Watch a Cloud is Consoling. Always.’
A poem by Gill McEvoy

‘To Watch a Cloud is Consoling. Always.’
(Jaan Kaaplinski, from ‘In the Forest’)

You sent me a cloud when I was ill.
It would have my name on it, you said,
so I would know it instantly.

I watched the window from my bed,
studying clouds.

One afternoon
of white and navy cumuli
it came:
a grey horse resting in a field.

This was the one you meant, I knew –
I watched its body gently yield
from horse to cloud again as such shapes do.

Each day it floats beside me now,
that quiet horse, your gift. My cloud.

About the Author:

Gill McEvoy is a Hawthornden Fellow (2012). Her third pamphlet “The First Telling”, (Happenstance Press 2014), won the 2015 Michael Marks Award. Two previous pamphlets from Happenstance Press. Two collections from Cinnamon Press: “The Plucking Shed”, 2010 and “Rise”, 2013. Recent collection “Are You Listening?” (Hedgehog Press 2020) and a Selected Poems due in late 2023, also from Hedgehog Press. Gill is a keen amateur botanist and lives in Devon, UK, where she leads wild-flower walks round her area.

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