The Flight

This is a poem written in Iraq, when I picked up my Dad from Bagdahd and flew back to Camp TQ:



The Flight

As we sat there
The helicopter lifted
An uncertain animal that gained its strength slowly.
Baghdad,
City of silence and sudden sound and fire
Glittered in deep sleep, chandelier lit in baroque splendor-
It fell away like a shining plate cast down a deep well.
Our trajectory took us
Great blades beat the sky with thunder
The night came like a wall of water,
Met us, enveloped and turned us, tucked our small bird away.

We flew.

I sat there on the hard canvas webbing, holding a strap
The back of the helo was an open door to the world
Night was a watchful mother with a sad heart.
The sand passed beneath us
The sky was large for the full moon,
It looked small and there were no stars.

I looked out and felt that our trip had no meaning
That the earth was full of a sorrow that could not be fixed
A pain beyond healing.
There was no stimulus, no dagger in the chest,
Just a realization that this was all that existed
Nothing else but us lived
Our lives were made of trips across deserts in the night.
In the faint light, I saw lines of trucks
Convoys creeping along the road with no lights;
I wondered if they would make it, and if they did,
Why did it matter because tomorrow they would go out again.

Why did we spend ourselves
Pour ourselves out like water on the ground?
The cycle was monolithic in its certainty
I felt we were children with grim faces 
We could not admit we stood alone.
I felt the wind.

The gunners were a boy and girl in Marine uniform;
They stood behind fifty cals up front
They looked out like mariners scanning for land at sea.
I couldn't see his face,
But the girl looked like an angel
She was serene, thoughtful
The moon slanting in captured her profile-
She was a pale statue with unknown eyes.
From the open cockpit, the pilots were conductors
Priests in helmets that bowed and prayed over their glowing altar
Practicing their religion of dim green dials, gleaming LEDs,
Adjusting their sacred artifacts to make a magical flight.
Out back, over the wide plain, we passed cities asleep
Ramadi to the left and Fallujah to the right.
In my sadness, amid the melancholy darkness of the bird's belly.
I asked for a sign
A signature from god
Be it life or maybe even death,
A falling from the sky in flames, contemplating it all in slow motion,
Something to take us from this empty desert,
Somewhere beyond anywhere but not here,
Here, for centuries, our relentless condition.
I heard nothing,
I listened,

Then in the steady beat
I heard a thousand breaths
Many wings that spun like wheels blending with the blades
The thundering rhythm became a seraphic splendor
A cloud of feathered power that marked a fierce time
Calm remembrance that greater things than us exist in the world
That they hide their presence but lurk in the fertility of the desperate mind.

Angels hide in loneliness,
We must strip away the bark
Cut deep into marrow and pierce the veil.
My eyes closed,
I became the jewel in the flower of my soul-
I heard the breath over the dark waters
I heard the small but stronger wind hidden in the big wind.
I heard the world's heartbeat,
A song subversively woven in with the speech of a machine.
I rested.

The helicopter dipped and began descent
Sand faded to water
The heart of Lake Habbaniya held our reflection.
We were home.