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.