The Cloud Dweller for National Faery Tale Day

I love Faery Tales.  I read them and had them read to me when I was a child, and I had my favorites.  I was not the princess.  I liked the regular girls best before they gained that status. Cinderella and Beauty were the daughters of merchants/storekeepers; Red Riding Hood was a woodcutter’s only child; the heroine of Rumpelstiltskin was a miller’s
daughter – and so on.

When I liked the ending as in Rumpelstiltskin I went with the story.  Of course I was the miller’s daughter who triumphed over the wicked little creature who would steal my child.

Red Riding Hood I revised when I read it to myself.  I was she, but in my version the wolf did not eat me, because I was so tough and so smart. It was I who rescued my grandmother just before my father arrived.

I pondered my propensity to make stories including faery tales suit my ideal – walk on clouds so to speak or 'head in the clouds' as momma put it.  I wrote the below poem in one of those moments when I had fallen through those insubstantial clouds to the reality of a disabled child and a sick husband, and...

The Cloud Dweller

far away

and long ago

there is a child

i used to know

with wide bright eyes

asking why

not out loud

but deep inside

why that way

and not my

way

those clouds those

insubstantial

faery vapors which

upheld us

have given way

to the ground

i wonder if

we shall walk

together

as easily as we

flew 

Cloud Dweller © Perle Champion 11/25/80