The Dirigible Balloon
Poetry for Children

Clouds in Trousers

Can you see shops and the fields below?
Where will we go, where will we go?

We can be funny clowns
or fluffy clouds in trousers,
sponging the sulking sun above,
always above the rain.

Go higher, further, faster,
find better, fresher, foreign words,
make friends across the world,
where English poems stretch to reach.

We’re off to the lands where your words still flow
over choppy white waves when the wild winds blow.

About the Writer


David Bleiman

David is a grandfather and poet living in Edinburgh. He loves to write across the languages and his first pamphlet, This Kilt of Many Colours (Dempsey & Windle, 2021) is a multilingual mixter-maxter in English, Scots, Spanish and Yiddish. This celebration of David's Jewish heritage includes the prizewinning Trebbler's Tale, written in a partly excavated but largely reimagined lost dialect of Scots-Yiddish. With the sense of humour of an overgrown schoolboy, David is now writing childish poems for himself and other children.