1. Terminal Three
How many nations can I see?
The beautiful and elegant,
The tattooed men and sleeping girls,
The drone of talk, the hum of planes,
(An aircon migraine coming on),
An altered world of wait-then-move,
A place where hats are worn indoors.
There is no smell. We wait, we move.
The people twitch and spark with life,
They watch for signs, they read the eyes:
An underscore of doubt and fear,
An overtone of joys postponed.
Here sound and light have coalesced.
Here everyone seems somewhere else.
2. In Flight
We know outside this metal skin
We’d die before we took a breath.
A wind beyond our earth-tied ken
Would rip our lungs and heart apart.
The red and green of near sleep,
Of drifting in a patterned haze.
A droning engine lulls our eyes,
Our senses mingle with the skies.
We plunge, we sleep, whichever comes.
We roll and tip out from the edge.
Adrift are certainties and hopes:
Out there the heedless rush of clouds.
The end of everything is air:
Just half a foot and we’ll be there.
3. Air Flow
Beneath us now there may be sea,
There may be history, may be land.
We are above, we are beyond:
A netherworld of curvatures.
We are the Europe – light on wings –
Where sun and moon are never dimmed,
A floating swirl of immigrants,
Where every heart is foreign born.
The clouds stretch on to Belarus
In fragile mountains, streams of breath.
Beneath are curious, earthbound things
With buried feet and downward eyes.
Our continent is shrinking fast,
It’s upside down, it never lasts.
4. Turbulence
It stopped
……………..and for an instant
……………………………………..droP
……………………………………………Ped
a sound not far frOM God rang out
it COULD have been my heart or
…………………………………………..mouth
………….have been a passing
it could breath
a rainbow MADE of solid air
a story told by broken WINGS
A
….thought of
………………….something
………………………………….something missed
or mayBE just my final spark
The sky had claimed another prayer
Another slip in time again
The fraud
…………….of flight EXPOSED by clouds
…concrete
a enemy of
…………………………….grey
I quickly learnt the simple
……………………………………truth:
I’m made for walking on the Earth.
Gavin R Jones 