cloud names III

presentiment  harbinger  ominous  obscurus  precipitous calamitous

skein  messenger  flotilla


My own names for clouds.

mind and body

"She could smile to herself now to think what contortions the body may twist itself into when something goes wrong in the mind. That detestation of food, those dizzying moments when you twirl helplessly on a kind of vacant devilish merry-go-round; that repetition of one thought on and on like a rat in a cage; those forebodings rising up one after the other like clouds out of the sea in an Arabian tale....."


The Wharf by Walter de la Mare from a collection of short stories entitled: Modern Short Stories edited and introduced by Jim Hunter, published by Faber Educational Books, 1969.

cloud names II

"Watchtower Smoke Syringe Hoof Pick-axe Tribunal Knickers Whip Soap House Dog Photo Revolver Dysentery Fire Scissors Shin Train Bowl Typhus Turnip Latrines Sun Coat Soup Lawyer Bed Child Straightline Coal Blanket Phenol Wool Fly Bathroom Rat Moustache Tooth Stove Lice Screams Skull America Barbed-wire."


Refusal by Soazig Aaron, translated from the French by Barbara Bray, published by Harvill Secker, London, 2007.

cloud names I

"She and her friends agreed to give names to the forty-five kinds of clouds in the five different languages they spoke. They spent some time agreeing on the names, repeating them, and then making up words out of the first or second letters of each name, and so on, then doing the same with the names spelled backwards.....

......Right up to the end, Klara told me, the clouds helped them get through the blows, the screams, the lack of privacy-....

......She gave me the list of clouds. One is missing."


Refusal by Soazig Aaron, translated from the French by Barbara Bray, published by Harvill Secker, London, 2007

cloud quotation

"When I do not walk in the clouds
I walk as though I were lost."


Antonio Porchina  Voces 1943

Translated from the Spanish by W S   Merwin.