“Flying is easy

The hard part is landing”

Just when they thought they had made it

Over the blood lands,

Through electrical storms,

Warm air turbulence,

The sky criss-crossed with their evasions

Divorce, death, debt, madness,

Ice on the wings,

Fuel surcharges,

Just then they saw

The landing strip appear

Lit up like a Christmas fair…

On the glide path to disaster

We’ll always wonder

Technical malfunction or doomed intervention?

Did their national histories shoot them down?

Or exhausted, disorientated

Having lost their horizon,

Undershot, overcompensated,

By human error, human love,

Driven into the ground?

Hail falls now

From the residue

Of their vapour trail

Under our feet

Cold hard bitter seed.