“Look up” by Mona Anderson

Look Up

I’d never seen blue clouds

until this morning. I swear

they’re blue, deeper than robins’

eggs, paler than blueberries,

blue like hyacinths in spring.

I wonder if I’m dreaming,

wonder if I’ve never looked up

at the right time, and I think

what if everyone lived

and worked in glass buildings

so that trudging from one dull

meeting to another, head down

thumbs darting on a phone,

or wheeled down a bleak

hospital corridor

for yet another test,

they might chance

a glance at the sky

and, disbelieving, grab

a person walking by,

Aren’t those damn clouds blue, really blue?

And they might gasp and grab

another and another

until hundreds stand

at the windows with you

staring at blue clouds.

Mona Anderson, a retired clinical mental health counselor, has lived in the New Hampshire countryside for 47 years where she and her husband raised two sons and a multitude of cats. Her work has appeared most recently in Gyroscope Review, Touchstone, Smoky Quartz, Adanna Literary Journal, Northern New England Review, Earth’s Daughters, Voices Unbound (An Anthology of International Poetry), Portrait of New England and Rat’s Ass Review.