An Irish Airman

I lay my book down, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, but keep my finger wedged between pages so I will not lose my place.

I sit at the gate of an airport, and I wonder if this flight, with these people, will end as a report on the news—how employees left a screw loose, and a plane fell helplessly through the clouds. Where would we slam down? Would we know our death was imminent? Would it be minutes or only seconds of waiting? Looking around at these people sitting in the hard chairs at the airport, I wonder who will scream. Who will pray or curse? Will flames follow us down, tearing the clouds to shreds?

I lay my book down, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, but keep my finger wedged between pages so I will not lose my place.

Strapped to a seat with death clinging at you like gravity—the smell of helplessness all around—is a fearful way to die. I do not want to hear the scream of the engine signaling a warning until the air stops moving over the thin, flexing wings—an aerodynamic waste. But I am not prescient and not told of how time ends and begins again without the sad click of a clock.

I pick up the book again and reread the tragic lines.

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

But instead of standing, grabbing my luggage, and walking away from the gate, I wait. The lines of Yeats, no matter how true, how visceral, are pushed down and swallowed. I wait and watch most of my fellow passengers palliated by the glow of their phones, a few turning the pages of a book or magazine—oblivious of me, of Yeats. I read more.

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

The thoughts boil again, and I force them back. I wait longer, convinced of my paranoia. I feel the urge toward my family and home. Instead, I keep waiting in the hard plastic chairs until an employee calls my boarding group, and I fold the corner of the page down like a dog’s ear and get in line.

Read An “Irish Airman foresees His Death” by William Butler Yeats

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death