Flying Home

Fly home now,
not with metal, and bolted bits,
but wings of wind and sunbeam.
Go home, in full flight,
like the birds you envied.
Another Tower has control,
and orders your direction.
Your instruments are set,
and you are going home.
You radioed to land,
not knowing that last landing
would end as it did.
It was the plane lost control,
and you were taken away,
following the orders of another Tower.
Did you look back?
Did you look down?
Don't look back, don't look down.
Fly on, toward the stars,
Toward the final freedom,
On your final flight.

Inspired by Eridanus. Photo by Simon Alvinge (Dreamland Media).

Survivor

He had been lost in the suffocating smoke and chaos of a doomed monolith.  He had emerged from the ruins coughing, sputtering, staggering, wounded, to wander among the dying and the maimed.  He had cheated death, survived to bear witness to a calamity that altered the world and changed his life.  He hated the way politicians created a myth, and used it for their own purposes, to settle old scores or to get re-elected.  He had seen heroism that day, but not everyone had been a hero.  Most survivors, like him, were victims, tormented now by rattling lungs and memory.

U.S. Navy Photo by Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Jim Watson

World View

There were certainties when we were youngsters. Canada was the best country in the world. The U.S. was good, too, our best friend, and we were Americans also because we lived in North America and talked like them (especially the ones who’d freed the slaves). We were also part of that pink grouping on the globe, and all those pink countries were good, because they stood for fair dealing and wise governance by white people. Riots, strikes and human rights violations were the work of evil, godless communists.
     There are no such certainties now. These days, everything’s so darned complicated.

Veterans

They are old now, and dying off, men who only reluctantly acknowledge who they were in their youths: a teenaged stoker on a sea-tossed corvette, an air-sick tail gunner over Hamburg, a starving POW in Yokohama. These are men who stand when a woman enters the room, whose strongest curse is “damn” or “hell”. They offer details shyly, as if they could not possibly matter and you, a kid, could not possibly be interested. They never dwelt upon themselves, nor needed a reality TV show to demonstrate their worth. They did so early on, then got on with their lives.