Ken's Poetry

Life Of Planes

Des Grimwood

Your folding chair is empty.
You must be flying your model,
the Focker or the Trimotor,
the Euro or the Aerostar …
no, that was 15 years ago.
It will be the Couger,
close tight loops and turns,
worried about your sight.

A shadow passes,
someone else sits in your chair.
Other’s gather,
stories are told,
jokes and repartee
but silence interrupts,
your absent voice
reverberates
in my head.

Then I hear you up there
at 500 feet, below the clouds,
and the drone of engines
grows from the east
and a thousand planes
are drawn like a curtain
across the sky …
Spitfire, Hurricane,
Lancaster, Comet,
Dornier, Bleriot
Cesna, Catalina …
their shapes, their names,
their sounds, their history
that flew inside your head
for seventy years or more.

This is your heaven
and you are up there
flying into the setting sun
never to return,
like so many planes before.