How to make a cloud

I once loved a man who as he walked beside me on my beach
composed a song
about how to make a cloud.
Little did I know that he would soon make me one.
Dead above me – smack bang above me – across the very early morning Bali sky
his spirit drew a perfect love heart. It filled the otherwise completely cloudless sky.
I saw it.
I blinked and turned and let myself sink under the water of the pool I was in.
I looked again and again and it was clear,
I almost drowned under my own astonished tears
but came up again and again for air
and it was still there.
No time to leave that pool and grab a camera I watched alone in wonder at its perfect shape
like he’d commissioned a pilot to create a long vapour trail of angel light a perfect outline the whisper of grey lit by the sun,
but no single plane flies in a perfect love heart shape without crossed lines and anyway there was no planes
and science will never explain it
my friends and family will never believe it.
The edge of perspective may,
spirituality and faith and love,
for what is it all for if not for love.
He knew I would see
he had the power and the will to do it
and he made that cloud
so perfect and powerful it moved me beyond anything I’d ever, nor will ever, know in this life.
It gently dissolved into the sky
but it was real.
As real as our love had been.
How to make a cloud he’d written as we walked along my beach –
I only recalled that much later.
You take the white from your hurt, mix with hope and laughter and the grey from your sorrow – wait till peace arrives and heat it with the warmth of your heart. Then pin it onto the sky of blue…
When the clouds are dry of tears take down the cloud, fold it with the breath of life and sprinkle joy all around.
That is how he said you make a cloud.
And he did just that.
In answer to my pleas, to quell my wretched questions, my awful doubts.
His heart cloud entered the million cracks of my shattered heart and pulled them all together
just a little
but enough
and in doing so he filled my heart to overflowing as he had once done many many times when he held his open palm against my chest
and whispered his devotion softly into my hair
and the power of that cloud lifted through my body and upwards to connect me to the beauty of the spiritual realm
as real as it is magical
as elusive as it is there for the taking for the healing for the knowing and believing.
He knew how to make a cloud and he did
no magic no lies
just the truth of what’s possible and what lies beyond
and what remains