For National Poetry Month, I’m writing poems inspired by words, ideas, and images from Virginia Woolf’s Diary.

Today I’m writing off this passage in the Diary: “The clouds–if I could describe them I would.”

Day #15: Clouds

There is no collective noun for clouds. Did Wordsworth notice that clouds rarely travel alone? They gather in great groups as they cast shadows across the prairie. No lonely wandering for these clouds. I imagine Wordsworth’s small English sky, tree-studded, tree-rimmed. Here, the skies are too vast to become metaphor.