(chuckle) ......
.... (sigh !)
why am I not surprised ..
thanks Fantome
will give it one more try
AIR MAIL – PALESTINE
“PRAISE God, from whom all blessings flow,”
The padre said; and row on row
The rustling hymn books, in the sun,
Flickered, were folded. Then as one
A thousand voices stirred the air –
Were silent. Heads were bent in prayer.
Above the Padre’s voice we heard
An engine drone; then like a bird
With silvered wings, we saw the plane
Above the sandhills, out to sea,
Heading, with mail, to Galilee.
And in the clouds we saw again
Our homes; the noonday shimmering sun
On farm, and beach, and station run;
The stock knee-high in summer grass,
The shearers nodding as we pass,
Each stand; the silos crammed with wheat,
The sheepdogs panting in the heat;
The breakers’ curl, the lash of foam.
The aching, taunting thoughts of home.
“Praise God, from whom…”, and each man bends
His head, to thank his God who sends
Halfway across the world, the mail:
Who deems those engines shall not fail,
But that they bring across the sea
The mail, to His own Galilee.
David McNicoll
FLYING TO NEW ZEALAND
HAULED headlong starward by the quadruple conviction
Of lion-lunged engines in their pride of power
That roar for their prey on the fleecy cloud-veldt –
The droves of distance and the dwindling hour.
We in their wake mounting winged as eagles
Are mingled with the moon-drift, surprise time past,
As hundreds and thousands of a glimmering coastline
Are brushed into darkness by our spurning blast,
Till we rest at the equipoise of sea and firmament
All night in the cradle of a rocking wing,
And the clouds file past by us in ceremonial order,
And the stars wheel backwards, and the engines sing.
And the ocean that was adversary to Cook and Tasman
Crawls, abject, tiny, through a cloud crevasse,
And suddenly with the sunrise we are in collision
And the sun boils molten from a gold morass.
And the Long White Cloud of the first discoverers
Lies billowed far below us, and the land they found,
As we sail, transmuted, in the solar morning,
In a soaring solitude drenched and drowned.
Michael Thwaites