Last week I went to Las Vegas for the annual GME Conference, and on the flight back I was able to get a window seat. I’ve always loved being able to look out and watch the world from so high up, and I was inspired to write one of my now-rare poems. I hope you enjoy it.
Seven Miles Up
Everyone should take an airplane trip once in a while
to gain a little humility,
to see our great constructs as patterned specks
our vast farmlands as a patterned quilt
the mountains themselves as crumpled paper
squeezed by some great Hand and then dropped.
Even the great rivers are reduced
to ribbons of silver bordered by fronds of green
like filing gathered around a sinuous magnet.
And then to look
up
up
up to a sky so utterly blue
it seems a breath could blow it away
and reveal the black and star-strewn Kosmos
hidden behind the azure film.
From seven miles up
the world seems both vaster and more small.
Hidden patterns of nature and of our own
are laid plain.
Life, us, all things strive for patterns
sense from senselessness
and in that we find beauty.
The meanders of a river
the whorls on my fingertip
the billion year dance of stars.
Patterns will out,
and in this I sense the Oneness of all things.
James C. Struck: Author of The Curious Snowflake 