Poem: Flying Home

Flying Home

In the next hour, skimming past

the face of West Papua and south

across the Arafura Sea,

we’ll seek to avoid disturbing

the legendary beast below –

the slumbering mass

of crocodile-dragon that might wake,

reach up and slap us down

to its equatorial home.

It is dark outside,

deep night over water.

Locked in this tubular jet of air,

this wind-rush ten kilometres above

the black and unseen surface of the sea,

we are lost between time-zones

of take-off and landing, of past and future.

In this present of lofty tunnelling through night

and steady blink of wing-light, we might even

rouse the monster’s rump and tail,

hearing our distant buzz away to the west

and stirring as we pass.

Soon, when the darkness

begins to lift, we’ll cross the faintly

glimmering northern coastline of home,

hours yet to travel. All jet-rush still,

we’ll push south over red earth

and spinifex, jousting our way

on the final stretch

through nebulous continents

of morning cloud.

Graham Wood lives in the northern suburbs of Sydney and has worked in a variety of occupations. His poems have been published in a number of Australian and international journals, newspapers and anthologies. Over 2021–2023, five chapbooks of his poems were published by Ginninderra Press, and a full collection of his poems Of Moments and Days was also published by Ginninderra in 2023.

Readers’ original and unpublished poems of up to 40 lines can be emailed, with postal address, to [email protected]. Submissions should be in the body of the email, not as attachments. A poetry book will be awarded to each accepted contributor.