High Flight

The aircraft picks up speed, a faint barely perceptible tottering giving me a quick flutter of anxiety. But it soon disappears in the sheer adrenaline rush of a take-off. I wait eagerly, my palms clutching the armrests for that exact moment when the wheels break the shackles of gravity and we are airborne.....I don't know why but this particular point always gives me a feeling of unbridled exhilaration. 

But soon my eyes droop for I had had to wake up at three am to catch this half past six flight and before I know it, I have fallen asleep, my cellphone screen still blinking in my hand.

A loud "Awesome!" jolts me awake. A teen boy in the seat diagonally opposite mine is peering down his cabin window and gushing...."Wow! Look! Awesome!"

I look out, almost in reflex. We have left the dusty brown polluting fog that envelops Ahmedabad far far below us. Here, at around probably 25000 to 30000 feet, there is just the pure sapphire blue of the atmosphere, so pure that I am a little dazzled by its brightness.  And a little below us, under that umbrella of blue, is a world of clouds. They are of all shapes and sizes and forms: great cones of ice cream, scattered wisps of cotton, some like freshly made paneer, others like mountains of mist and still others like a perfectly flat calm sea of white....

Everything seems rock solid, like a real world and I have to really exert my imagination to convince myself that it is all just water vapour, all evanescent and one would plunge right through it in case one decided to jump out of the aircraft......

I look up once again at that beautiful blue. The aircraft passes through a short grove of clouds. Now, I am so close that it feels I can actually put out my hand and touch them and feel their cool dampness against my fingers...And as the aircraft rushes through them and emerges once more into the blue, the words of High Flight by John Gillespie a World War Air Force pilot who attained martydom in that war, comes dancing into my mind....

I write because I love the dance of skillfully strung words and I simply adore the word-dance created by this poet in his short and simple but exquisite poem.

Read and enjoy the sheer exhilaration of High Flight...

(I'd advice you read it aloud in your mind, if that's something possible)

High Flight

By

John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things-
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.