wishing fairy tales were reality

reading fairy tales by brothers Grimm

and Hans Anderson and folk stories

delighted by the imagination creating

people out of animals and objects

anthropomorphism has a way

of capturing our own delight

of wishing there were tiny people

to inhabit childhood world to be

our friends and explain what we

cannot understand about adults

and how to fit into their strange world

questions I’d still like to be answered

lo, these many years living

among grown-ups 

cloud screens

cloud screens

clouds gather to gossip

wisp-disperse to pass on notes

collect again shaped as news

art screens of horse in gallop

elm trees, sailing ships or seals

or as my kindergarten son informed me

“Look, Mom, there’s a man.

See his eyes and his chin

and there, under his nose

there’s his mustard.”