Flying Ops

From the soles of the feet
to the edges of your teeth,
you can feel it in every single bone:
Rolls-Royce smash kilo-newtons backward,
pursuant rage vibrates along the wing
and into the fuselage.

You’ve sucked oxygen, the mask
jammed hard against your face,
a hangover or nerves? Who cares?
Merlin shouts into the ether
‘Nimrod is ready’ – and you are not:
not even for mission abort.

The flight deck are reading cards,
checks they do in their sleep:
twenty nine –Twenty Nine – strapped in,
krugerrands in pockets, pistols in metal boxes.
ready for take-off into the blue
and into the danger.

As if…

30,000 feet up – beyond blue –
we are untouchable, invincible:
nothing murderous from Mosul,
or killing from Kabul
can touch us up here,
nothing at all.

We issue confident reports of artillery
and Roland of the rocket troops
- based on half-heard call-signs
and misheard messages on the airwaves -
by satellite and microwave
to London and the Pentagon.

The new-Olympians play Risk:
they move pieces on Mercator-mapped
computer screens in Cold War Dungeons
as outdated as the policies
the brave and foolish implement
on the other side of the world.

You look out of the porthole,
one of the few with a view,
you look outside at Iraqi deserts,
or the Afghan Karakorum,
or maybe even Damascus:
it’s like a child’s atlas.

Until…

The landing comes, on Aphrodite’s Isle,
or in some dry desert
owned by Sheikh Yer Moneymaker,
who went to school with the pilot:
either way you run for solitude
and the peace of terra firma.