when the sky is falling

Claudia Coutu Radmore

clouds,                                 you old-fashioned hoarders
collecting almost anything infinitesimally           small
        in your aerial tickle trunks:
dust, dinosaur detritus, phytoplanktons, a pseudomona
or two              billion,                bits of pollen, bacteria
wheat stem rust, feather vanes
anthrax spores                                          a scrap
   of hydrostatic skeleton
and maybe some bdelloid rotifers
      (who wouldn’t want to hang on 

to a darling
       three-part
pseudocoelomate wheel-animal!?)
whatever tiny things
  air currents will waft to the troposphere
clouds have got

and every individual                     is a starlet looking for
an ice crystal to hang onto, a screen test             hoping                            
for only one thing
to be the nucleus         of a raindrop
                                                      name in lights

but clouds know
that small things soon grow anxious for home
       that billions of them massed are heavy as elephants
so they let the rain go
tons of seeded molecules                                                 
water tension chaperones
keeping them
together
and they fall back to earth          
in sombreros and leis
as drops
or snowflakes
as hard
or soft hail
delirious to be home even as      rime                       
pale and opaque                       
lighting a cold                      
            bare
                     branch

The Science

Rain is formed high in the atmosphere as water collects around dust and smoke particles in clouds, but it also can form around other minuscule bits such as zooplanktons, pseudomonas, pollen, bacteria, faeces, and bdelloid rotifers, known informally as wheel animals or wheel animalcules, anything whisked into the atmosphere by wind, updrafts, or storms. The tiny bits become the nuclei of raindrops made of water molecules held together by water tension. Rime ice layers itself into miniature fairy-tale-forms when supercooled fog droplets come in contact with sub-zero surfaces.    

The Poet

Montreal-born writer Claudia Coutu Radmore’s Accidentals won the 2011 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Her latest lyric poetry collections are rabbit and Park Ex Girl, both published in 2020. Claudia is the President of Haiku Canada, and on the Council of The League of Canadian Poets.

Next poem: Altered Axis by Amy Boyd