Poem at 30,000 Feet

I'd forgotten about this until this evening, so I decided to polish it up and post it. I wrote this on my Dallas to Chicago flight back in March. I think I was trying to capture in words why exactly I love flying so much. Anyway, here it is.

Poem at 30,000 Feet

flying on a cloudy day
rising in an airplane up and away from the anchor
of land
rising through dense, damp white before

seeing the sun

feeling its heat knowing
that people miles below shiver
under lowering gray

watching the sun revealed
through a veil of water vapor

light spills upon the floor of clouds
reflected white as on the surface
of a still, morning lake

your craft rocked roughly by the fists
of the fussing wind currents

above, the blue that fades to black
where the imagination dusts in stars

below, rolling hills, peaked ridges,
smooth plains all white and soft gray,
the landscape of the sky
and somewhere beneath this new ground
falls snow.
a second blanket covering
the distant memory
of the frozen earth.