July Clouds: A Poem

July Clouds

The clouds have returned

Making things feel more normal, somehow

A treason to harsher winds

Milder skies now brew with beauty

For this afternoon, anyhow

Crafted vapors, cushioned contours

Cyan silhouettes charming sailors

And the landlocked alike

Their forms forever fading, changing

And the bosom retreating

Into a mountain slope, or arching hill

Turns gently into a pebbled brook

Silent and still, sometimes

This thing on which to muse

Crafting itself with the sky’s endless breath

Rolling sweetly towards the western sunset

Leaving West Virginia far below and reaching

Upwards to the outermost skin of this world

Aaron P. Kittle ©2015

Aaron P. Kittle is an Elkins native – a 1999 graduate of Elkins High School and a 2004 graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College. Always creatively involved in music, art and design, Kittle began his interest in poetry while writing lyrics for various local bands in which he performed, starting in 1996. Kittle cites his grandmother, Beth Guye Kittle as a source of mentoring and encouragement, having published poems in countless magazines and two of her own volumes: The Sanctioned Fruit (1998) and A Widow’s Lament (2015). Since his start, Kittle has written over 200 poems and lyrics. Of Elkins, Kittle says, “Elkins has a very unique spirit that’s partly embedded in the people, and partly embedded in the surrounding mountains. If you embrace it, it embraces you. This place is unlike anywhere else. Here in West Virginia, worshipping God simply requires stepping outside. Growing up, people always talk about leaving West Virginia and Elkins behind…that’s something you find everywhere, but Elkins is the kind of home one always longs for. I’ll always be an Elkinite.” Kittle is employed as marketing director at Jenkins Subaru-Hyundai in Bridgeport, where he lives with his wife, Jessica.