Every Ray of Sun

Beware the day for the bane has begun;
once sunlight shone but now there’s barely none.
High in the atmosphere, seemingly proud,
comes the vast alien light-blocking cloud.

Nobody knows of its primary source,
but it remains a light-pilfering force.
Maybe from Pleiades or born in Oort,*
precious sun resource has now been cut short.

Bereft of light but not totally gone,
subject to cloud whim, light sometimes comes on.
Alien cloud has no reason nor rhyme,
perhaps an hour’s worth, some of the time.

Needless to say sunlight now exceeds gold;
yet sans the sunlight, the Earth is not cold.
Light from the infrared trickles on through;
it is not Venus but that warmth will do.

Darkness is now an American way,
but that is true of Japan and Pompeii.
(They felt the fury of volcanic might;
now, like the rest of us, they seek the light.)

Changes in growth for the crops and the trees,
plankton and algae-less, hardship in seas.
All ‘round the world is the state of disrupt;
vast are the greenhouses now cropping up.

Every attempt that the mind can conceive,
has been put forth to get the cloud to leave.
Baffling physicists and mind’s elite,
it is a cloud with dense clay on its feet.

On those occasions when sunlight is rare,
many the species that go out and stare.
Otter, alpaca, the rhesus and man,
soak in the sunlight as fast as they can.

But when it's gone (and again, it’s not much),
life forms from anywhere savor each touch.
Yet planet-wide comes an upsurge in brood;
vitamin D dearth affects every mood.

There is a cloud that arrived from deep space,
limiting how much we see the sun’s face.
(They savored the warm, the pink on their cheeks
  as it was the first sunny day in weeks.)


40 Lines
Writer’s Cramp
11-21-19

*The Oort Cloud is a vast cloud of comets beyond
  our solar system, almost half way to the nearest star.