Blue sky thinking

Blue Sky Thinking

Let's do this again, ground the planes for a while
and leave the runways to the racing hare,
the evening sky to Venus and a moon
so new it's hardly there. Miss the deal,
the meeting, the wedding in Brazil.
leave the shadowless Atlantic to the whale,
its song the only sound sounding the deep
except the ocean swaying on its stem.
Let swarms of jets at quiet airports sleep.
The sky's not been this clean since I was born.
Nothing's overhead but pure blue silence
and skylarks spiralling into infinite space,
a pair of red kites flaunting in the air.
No mark, no plane-trail, jet-growl anywhere.

The national poet for Wales, Gillian Clarke , wrote this sonnet two years ago when all air travel ceased in the UK following the cloud of ash emitted by a volcano in Iceland.
Today it was wonderful to see the blue and feel the heat of the sun on my walk. When I turned for home, after hearing their cries continuously I came face to face with a red kite perched on a fence post. It lifted off into the sky before I had time even to reach for my camera. (The juvenile birds have not been faring well in the recent wet weather according to a report today.)

Note: I was surprised to find that Gillian Clarke's Wikipedia entry, above, includes one of my own photographs.