Sunrise

Sunrise
Sunrise on Sunset Beach

Saturday, February 9, 2019

Prayer at Forty Thousand Feet

While Flying Home from my Daughter's Wedding
January 20, 2019

It is minus sixty C outside 
when the headwind hits a hundred. 
The whole plane shakes. I scrunch 
inside an airline blanket, 

catnapping across the North Atlantic. 
I nibble on gnocchi and mild cheddar, 
nurse a lukewarm ginger ale, 
and study the seat-back screen 

inches from my face. Call me 28J. 
My world is a shuttered tube 
encased in a rumble inside a dull roar 
tracing the twilight arc toward home.

Old Blighty is hours behind.
Below, an unseen ocean. We track 
northwest, laying a trail of carbon 
over the top of the troposphere. 

Screens flicker. 27G smiles 
as a dinosaur eats an actor.
24E comforts her child. 
29H reads a real book. 

Outside my portal, the full wolf moon 
burns through high crystal haze. 
Some forty thousand feet below, 
a blue-white coast slides by. 

Strangers in Nuuk are watching 
the sky. Back in Biggleswade, 
my daughter and her Englishman 
are braving the evening chill.

People I love live north now,
so I pray for the polar vortex – 
may its circle be unbroken 
and bottle up the Arctic air. 

And I bless the Gulf Stream – 
may it meander north forever 
and carry the warmth of Georgia 
to my new-forged family abroad.





2 comments:

  1. This captures so many dimensions in so few words—marvelous!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Love this poem. I could write something similar about the trip home from Fez after Anne's wedding. Amazing the international bonds of love these daughters' marriages create.

    ReplyDelete