Turbulence

Hello Dear Ones! I am sitting in a quiet room, after a couple of strangely warm February days, waiting for a tornado watch to count down and expire. this all reminded me of a draft I wrote a few days ago, inspired by George Ella Lyon’s line, “oval of heaven,” and an eventful plane trip.

We hit turbulence on the flight home from Addis Ababa.

In a row to myself in the center of the plane

I sat alone in the aisle seat,

looked across at the young man sitting alone in his aisle seat.

He smiled, wanly, at me as if to say:

Something will happen.

Perhaps we will die.

It’s nothing to do with us now.

We buckled in and rode the angry swells of air for a while.

The scattered pillows, the blankets bouncing in the empty seats,

the spilled bags and lip gloss rolling down the aisle—

all of it was nothing to the Real I could not see,

the story that we would make it home,

our gentle past, our sparkling future,

all of it as real as the belt pulled tight and low across my hips.

One more lurching drop, I lost my breath, and then

the air flattened out.

I stretched myself back across the row of empty seats,

pretending that the heart-held tale of home was real enough

to carry me across weather, space, and time.