Photo provided by Karen Loeb

“Flying” proved to be a popular subject for poetry. There were quite a few excellent poems submitted. In some poems “flight” was metaphoric. In others, it was literal flight, whether in an airplane, hanging onto a parachute, on skis in the half pipe competition, or otherwise. Judge Caroline Johnson picked “Photo Opportunity,” as the third place poem:

 

Photo Opportunity

In New York my daughter stands
against a gigantic black and white
butterfly mural on a brick building
and opens her arms against the wings
becoming the butterfly body
her long lean form fitting perfectly.
“Take the picture, Mom.” 
The command issued, I dig out my phone,
tap the button
catching her wide smile
imagining that she’ll launch herself,
soaring above us, startling diners
in this neighborhood populated with
outdoor restaurant seating,
people pointing upward with their forks
or knives, amazed to see this enormous
butterfly with long black hair
sailing above them,
one man declaring,
“It’s a kite. It has to be a kite.”      

~Karen Loeb

This poem was first published in Gyroscope Review 19.2 Spring 2019 p. 20.

About this poem, the judge (who did not see the photo) says, “Lovely metaphor throughout without being too obvious. The daughter is becoming “the butterfly body” as the mother imagines her flying away, dazzling others with her “long black hair”. The ending becomes almost surreal or speculative as the girl has transformed into flight.”

 

The second place poem references bird flight, but that becomes a metaphor for the “flight” of the child’s imagination, dissociating himself from where he is.

Murmuration

 

            I was in the car, just a kid, just in the backseat,

            and could hear only the hum of the engine

            and the hum of my parents talking–

            but wasn’t childhood all a hum, and none of it concerning me?

 

Except that what I saw did concern me

and I, with that child’s instinct for secrets 

kept it to myself–it, that had the same forbidden,

wandering-edged shape of the word “private,”

the shape of the feeling after first glimpsing a Playboy

in a cluster of boys, shoulder-to-shoulder, bodies crowding, 

moving in a way much like starlings at dusk.

 

            It would have been better if I had been standing still,

            not curving off around a mountain, away, trailing off; 

             and it would have been better stood at the edge of a quiet field, 

            not in a droning car, where I could only imagine the sound–

            and better if I had been older, less inclined toward secrets.

            But what wouldn’t be improved by stillness, quietness, 

                                forthrightness?

 

It would have been better to have turned to someone–

an old friend, or my father, who is getting older or, better,

someone who I couldn’t, without this moment, understand–

and say to them, “What is it called?”

that question that would never have occurred

to the me in the back of a car. Such things didn’t have names.

 

            To hear a person say that word for the first time

            in the presence of the thing it described–that giant black lung

            hyperventilating in the sky, powered by a thousand birdbreaths–

            the answer, how perfect, one of the few perfect words.

 

It happened like this instead: I was in the back of a car, 

and the word I learned much later, in some unmemorable way. 

 

            And still there’s the possibility that I might be at the edge of a field,

            conscious of my own dark lungs filling and falling

            just as those starlings fill and fall, the rhythms of all breath,

            and that someone–who hardly matters:

            matters less than the fact that, whoever they are, 

            they are beyond any sacred silliness–

            could still turn to me and say, “What is it called?”

            and I’ll know, and say to them that perfect word

            that describes the sound of a black cloud of starlings–

            a thousand wings opening and closing, a thousand beaks–

            and the sound of one divulging a long-kept secret.

 

~ Goddfrey Hammit

Johnson’s comments on this poem: “The writer places you in the backseat of a car, a snapshot of childhood and being introduced unknowingly to something s/he isn’t aware of--yet. The bird imagery is introduced in the second stanza, with the comparison between a group of boys gawking at Playboy magazine and a group of starlings. The narrator seems to be dissociating him/herself from the scene in the back of the car, much the way a group of birds view land from up high. The “secret” becomes a “black cloud of starlings” with wings “opening and closing.”

 

And now for the first place winner:

Instruments of Peace
            With the perfect development of the airplane,
            wars will be only an incident of past ages
            —Orville Wright (1909)

That’s what the Wright brothers thought.
Their invention—this heavier than air
machine—would be the great arbiter
of military engagement. No movement
on the ground would go unnoticed by
either army. Instruments of peace.

Wilbur studied doves, killdeer, learned
how they warped their wings to control
their turns and landings light as feathers.

And later, a Frenchman studied insects
to develop the monocoque fuselage—
a single shell, a laminated skin carrying
all the stresses, all the loads, even bombs.

They dragonflied skies in the Great War.
Engines droned, planes buzzed like flies
over the spoils.

~John C. Mannone

First published in The Linnet’s Wings [Sorrow Issue, Fall 2018]

Johnson says this is a “wonderful historical poem that brings to light a little-known fact--that the Wright brothers wanted more than just flight with their invention. Each stanza pacts a lot of facts without being didactic. Verbs like “warped, ‘dragonflied’ and ‘droned’ add power to the poem, which ends with an unfortunate tragic conclusion.”

 

Copyright:
Each poet retains copyright of his or her own poem. 

Honorable Mentions:

Caroline Johnson selected two poems for honorable mention "for their funny, short, light verse that imagine what it might be like to fly, despite gravity, including [in one of them] a 'phalic rocket' on a mission to outer space." They are "Set Me Free" by Kay Lesley Reeves and "Homage to Bezos" by Christy Schwan. 

 

Bios:

Goddfrey Hammit was born and raised in Utah, and lives in Utah still, in a small town outside of Salt Lake City. Hammit has, most recently, contributed work to The Ekphrastic Review, Amethyst Review, and Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and is the author of the novel, Nimrod, UT. His web address is goddfreyhammit.com. 

Caroline Johnson has two poetry chapbooks and several hundred poems in print. A nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, she has won numerous state and national poetry awards, including the 2012 Chicago Tribune's Printers Row Poetry Contest. A former English teacher, she is president of Poets & Patrons of Chicago. Her full-length collection of poems, The Caregiver (Holy Cow! Press, 2018), was inspired by years of family caregiving. Visit her website at www.caroline-johnson.com.

Karen Loeb’s poems and stories have appeared recently in Big City Lit, Halfway Down the Stairs, Thema, Foreign Literary Journal, and Hope is the Thing, an anthology from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Her work has won both the fiction and poetry contests in Wisconsin People and Ideas. She was Eau Claire, Wisconsin writer-in-residence 2018-2020.

John C. Mannone has poems in Windhover, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry South, Baltimore Review, and others. He won the Impressions of Appalachia Creative Arts Contest in poetry (2020), the Carol Oen Memorial Fiction Prize (2020), and the Joy Margrave Award (2015, 2017) for creative nonfiction. He was awarded a Jean Ritchie Fellowship (2017) in Appalachian literature and served as the celebrity judge for the National Federation of State Poetry Societies (2018). His forthcoming collections are Flux Lines: The Intersection of Science, Love, and Poetry (Linnet’s Wings Press, 2021), Sacred Flute (Iris Press, 2022), and Song of the Mountains (Middle Creek Publications, 2022). He edits poetry for Abyss & Apex and other journals. A retired physics professor, John lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. http://jcmannone.wordpress.com.

Kay Lesley Reeves is a retired expat living in Spain. A former teacher of young children and children with special needs, she is enjoying the time exploring her creative side through art, music and writing.

Christy Schwan is a former hippie chick turned business owner capitalist. Now retired, she is pursuing an encore career as an author/poet. A native Hoosier, rock hound, wild berry picker, wildflower seeker, astrology studier, and quiet sports lover of kayaking, canoeing, showshoeing and loon spotting. Her work has been published in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Arie. Anthology, 8132 Review, and 2022 Wisconsin Poet's Calendar.

 

© Wilda Morris