Idlewild

Back then it was enough
to stand outside the fence
with dad and watch
the lumbering steel birds taxi
down the runway,
then bank into the blue and vanish.

We were seeing no one off,
yet felt the ache of departure, even then,
and the mystery of it,
how something can leave so completely,
leaping into air, defying gravity
to land upon a shore a world away.

*

Richard Schiffman is an environmental reporter, poet and author of two biographies based in New York City. His poems have appeared on the BBC and on NPR as well as in the Alaska Quarterly, the New Ohio Review, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, Writer’s Almanac, This American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and other publications. His first poetry collection “What the Dust Doesn’t Know” was published in 2017 by Salmon Poetry.