Poems on Travel

Every summer, we head to California to visit family. Although our six-hour plane trip – with little kids in tow – is decidedly unromantic, that moment of lift-off, of anything-can-happen, is marvelous.

On the subject of plane travel, I love David Brendan Hopes’ poem “A Jet Flying Over Oxford.” Here’s an excerpt from the poem, from his book A Dream of Adonis:

Strange tenderness I feel for you,

little fishbones of a jet…

a crack in the Wedgewood blue,

bird-like and spirit-like, swiftly passing.

Strange tenderness–

As if you were small as you look

and I’d catch you if you fell–

……………………………………………..

As if you were a spirit like my spirit,

thin bone, blown fluff, smoke,

nowhere alighting–

as if you were the one who comes in thunder

when he will, and all are summoned home.