Snowfall and flight
Planes that have flown or not flown,
brought travellers, young students
to a new world they hope will open doors
to adult prospects, older people back
from Europe or a brother’s sickbed,
or that have dropped bombs on rivals spent
to establish supremacy at home and abroad,
all shrouded in snow this morning:
a white caress of H2O, sweet natural hand
laid on our feverish anxieties. The planes wing
silently and invisibly through, or not through,
this atmosphere to bring, or not bring, all
human forward motion to land, or not to land:
the miraculous ambitions of flight blanked out
under their veil of multiple unreplicated
pattern, individual, fragile and fleeting,
unseen, imagined.
Planes that have flown or not flown,
brought travellers, young students
to a new world they hope will open doors
to adult prospects, older people back
from Europe or a brother’s sickbed,
or that have dropped bombs on rivals spent
to establish supremacy at home and abroad,
all shrouded in snow this morning:
a white caress of H2O, sweet natural hand
laid on our feverish anxieties. The planes wing
silently and invisibly through, or not through,
this atmosphere to bring, or not bring, all
human forward motion to land, or not to land:
the miraculous ambitions of flight blanked out
under their veil of multiple unreplicated
pattern, individual, fragile and fleeting,
unseen, imagined.