This week’s Friday poem is ‘Takeoff’ for all of you at the airport, waiting to board a flight home after a long week @work. Timothy Steele is an award winning poet who serves as a professor of English at Cal State LA.
Our jet storms down the runway, tilts up, lifts:
We’re airborne, and each second we see more—
Outlying hangars, wetlands with a pond
That flashes like sheened silver and, beyond,
An estuary and the frozen drifts
Of breakers wide and white along a shore.
One watches, cheek in palm. How little weight
The world has as it swiftly drops away!
How quietly the mind climbs to this height
As now, the seat-belt sign turned off, a flight
Attendant rises to negotiate
The steep aisle to a curtained service bay.
Timothy Steele, from ‘The Color Wheel’, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994
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