“Flying is easy
The hard part is landing”
Just when they thought they had made it
Over the blood lands,
Through electrical storms,
Warm air turbulence,
The sky criss-crossed with their evasions
Divorce, death, debt, madness,
Ice on the wings,
Fuel surcharges,
Just then they saw
The landing strip appear
Lit up like a Christmas fair…
On the glide path to disaster
We’ll always wonder
Technical malfunction or doomed intervention?
Did their national histories shoot them down?
Or exhausted, disorientated
Having lost their horizon,
Undershot, overcompensated,
By human error, human love,
Driven into the ground?
Hail falls now
From the residue
Of their vapour trail
Under our feet
Cold hard bitter seed.
