Airport

Have you noticed
airports offer a better life?
These clean facilities
send us to our dreams,
direct us like dolls
or groggy royals
for a day or two.

On moving walkways
we amble with the speed of runners,
conveyed like gifts,
pass liqueurs
and the perfumes of lioness ladies.
We glide over sterile tiles,
gaze thoughtfully at vacuities of coloured books,
admire ourselves
in artfully located glass.

My mind travels to Californian beaches
and Burmese temples.
Where will the sun shine for me tonight?
I allow myself a despotic grin.
I am like a demi-god
whose minions finger buttons,
send messages away
to make my tomorrows.

While I wait at gate seventeen,
I discover a robin.
Was it taken in by the silver panels
and the idols that promised all,
or drawn by nectared food?
Had it aspired to the flight of those other birds
whose wings cross oceans,
would reach the moon in twenty days
at the same speed?

Trapped behind glass
it does not know its way free.
The red breast beats,
but loses strength at last,
and falls in the glare
of the confusing fluorescent moons.

I am no god here and cannot help.
The man I talk to laughs at me.
Poor robin you did not know
how much you could already roam,
in your heart did not dream too much
but too little dreamed.
You did not know how far
you could already fly.

_________________________________________________

 Colin