Morning Flight

Poems have many ways of presenting themselves to me.

Sometimes they wait patiently for me to discover them ... and am I ever surprised ... because they've been there all the time ... I just hadn't noticed until now.

Sometimes they almost literally leap out at me. Some event, some thought sets them into motion ... and they're often so fragile ... so like the smoke from an evening fire ... that I have to capture them quickly on paper, or they're gone ... gone forever.

I remember exactly where I was when this poem leaped out at me.

I was walking alone, east on Wayne Avenue, just a block west of Smithville. Something glinted in the early-morning sky, and I paused to stare at it. It was a plane ... just a tiny speck on that deep, deep blue blanket of sky.

When I got back home, I sat at the kitchen table, as was my custom then, and started writing. The result, after many revisions (that process of slowly boiling it down to its very essence):

MORNING FLIGHT

Great silver-gray fish

gliding silently

across the cold blue

of morning

toward that huge red

bait of a sun,

passengers settled

in your slender belly,

flying away

from earthbound creatures

just stirring awake,

waiting for the sun

to begin reaching

toward them, too.

© 1998

(originally published in Midwest Poetry Review)

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Today's word: essence

Afterthoughts ... in response to your comments:

Oh (blush-blush), thank you for those comments, Southernmush. As I say, over and over, so much depends on what the reader brings to the poem ... Me? I just take ordinarysubjects and try to see them in a different way ... like a youngster might, on seeing them for the first time. I'm no youngster, of course, so that takes practice ... and, sometimes, a lot of tweaking, polishing, reworking, to get a poem to say what I really want it to ... then, like a youngster with a newly found object, I try to find someone so I can show them and share it.