On This Flight
by Barbara Siegel Carlson
The clouds speak in tongues I can’t understand.
The horizon opens to a blinding crack.
If I could know the language
it would be pure as oxygen, soundless
as how we came to be on this flight.
But there are no such words.
I wish I could reach you, touch you
through one of those bodies passing by,
as though wishing were a kind of prayer,
a way to carry belief into infinity.
Lao-tzu says there is nothing breath cannot enter.
Already beyond the plane window,
the horizon has softened, sunk into the lost sun
like an amethyst rose that has no root
and whose light takes every soul.
Copyright © 2017 by Barbara Siegel Carlson.