Rachel McCrum - WEATHER WATCHERS Poem #5

The Weather Watchers relates to a certain secret geekiness on my part. I confess I am a weather geek. Part of this is related to a childhood – and adulthood – spent sailing. Whether days in small dinghies on the Irish Sea, off the coast of my childhood home in Donaghadee, Northern Ireland, or longer sails on bigger boats across the North Sea between Scotland and Norway, across the Baltic, or off the coast of Portugal, it's important to be able to read certain cloud formations, or understand weather systems: to know what's coming. To understand what a cumulonimbus cloud formation heralds (possibly thunder and lighting, which are rather scary in boats), or what an anticyclone means.

And of course, there is the Shipping Forecast, which is a poem all in itself. Those glorious names: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire: Forties, Cromarty, Tyne, Dogger: Rockall, Malin, Hebrides. The cadences of it. Carol Ann Duffy has already, for me, written the definitive poem about the Shipping Forecast in 'Prayer' but even then, nothing can beat the forecast itself. Listening to the 1754 broadcast was a ritual in my dad's car when he brought us home from school in Belfast. We had to be quiet for that, him listening intently and us bored and uncomprehending. It wasn't until years later that I learnt how to understand it for myself. 370 words only. Gale warnings, general synopsis, (position, pressure, tracking the pressure areas), wind direction, wind strength, precipitation, visibility. For those who understand it, for those to whom it matters, it is a communion of sorts. And it is beautiful.

But to this week's poem! I'm intrigued by the new BBC 'Weather Watchers' project , encouraging amateur weather watchers to upload local accounts of the weather around them. The idea of democratising weather reports, of learning how to read and record them, of removing some of this mystery, or at least teaching people how to become speak that language. I love this. And I also love the idea that becoming more aware of the weather, of understanding how to predict what may be coming can create a greater global awareness of how weather systems are interconnected. How what's happening on one side of the planet can affect us too. The disconnect between weather and ourselves, particularly for those of us who live mostly in urban centres, can be quite profound. We've built cities so we don't have to worry about the weather, or let it affect us anymore. I'm not quite sure this is how things should be.

I go on air with Fiona Stalker for 'Out for the Weekend', for a good natter about all things weather related, and a wonderful conversation about localised words for weather, particularly in light of the new Historical Thesaurus of Scots being published online. I learn that Scots has a specific word for the effect of snow driven by wind around a corner - 'feefle'. I feel another poem coming on.

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There's a hurricane in Taiwan
and somewhere in Paraguay
a butterfly flaps its wings
or something like that.

There are people watching the skies
waiting for the rise
and fall in the atmosphere.

Is it, we wonder, any surprise
that we call them highs
and depressions?

Yes, it's to do with pressure
but how much we take the weather
and tie it to our moods

without really thinking it through.
If we're high over here,
are they low over there?
What's coming our way?

There are people watching the skies
become cloud interpreters
wind translators
wielders of anemometers
and scrutinisers of the wind vane.

It's no great secret.
Open your eyes
and look up.

There's a hurricane in Taiwan
and flooding in Albufeira,
a second summer in Montreal,
and in Edinburgh, the fog has
vanished the mountain.

Open your eyes
and look up.
It's no great secret.
There are people watching the skies
telling it like it is
to try and understand
what's coming.