I am often there above you like a shield or a shadow, that presence that you scan for rain or indications of the coming weather. I can be broken like a torn photograph with gaps that show you the distances that my half-remembered form has you guessing at. I can move with a swiftness that defies all pace-keeping and sweep my shadow overland and sea with humbling rapidity.
I am low and high, cumulus fluffy or strata straight, lazy as a long summer day or busy casting down the rain. You see me. You ignore me. You fly through me.
And now from space you watch me as if clouds were a second Earth, stretched with changing forms across the continents and oceans with a vaporous instinct and near magnificence. And across the Universe now you can see I come in many different colours and have many functions to perform to bring life into being and keep it living.
And you write about me with unceasing interest because you know we exist together. Bound as no things are bound to one planet, growing in shared appreciation of each other.
But I alone know what it means to watch for millennia.