2 Meteorological Sonnets

“Neon Gray”

Goodbye, O Sun! Gray cloud must cover you
With sodden ashes, shrouding thoughts I need,
The nourishing photons I need, the blue
Of a high-pressured day I need, my reed
Bent further than it strictly speaking should.
Obliged by circumstances to be meek,
I’d storm the very clouds if I but could,
& shoving them aside I’d take a peek
At what the selfish, drifting brutes
Were keeping to themselves: the open blue!
The swirling elements are in cahoots...
No culprit shows its mug, to shoot or sue.
I won’t stay long in places it does this!
The moral’s this: give Weather’s slums a miss.

"Contraction & Magnanimity"

Grim sky looms low, a sickly, writhing void
Inside of one. Nightmarish graygrim days
And that low-pressure with which they're alloyed
Replace habitual disciplines with haze
As harsh self-criticisms smirk and feud.
No progress and no product is enough
On such a day, with static gray imbued;
One's very soul departs one in a huff...
But grander days of gliding, godlike clouds
Proclaiming an exact munificence --
Recalled to mind -- oppose these banshee shrouds
Of a particular deluge... Intense,
Far, warming, this light yoke of hours starts.
A whole begins to coalesce from parts.

* Both poems by T. Appleman

There is a particular sky visible on overcast days in NZ -- a bright gray sky which suggested the phrase "neon gray" to me; both of these Elizabethan sonnets are a response to that sky, which I do not remember having seen prior to immigrating to NZ almost five years ago.