Friday poem

Pilot

I dreamed I was the pilot of a small plane

brought down by a minor squall

over the upper Midwest.

And, too, I was a passenger on a train

traveling through the small town

where the plane chose to fall,

just at the railroad crossing,

just as I arrived.

And I was the chief of police

of that small town,

my staff of three

off on a holiday weekend.

The whole thing was on the news.

Luckily, every one of us

walked away with only a few scrapes.

“Nothing to see here,” I said,

in my best police chief voice.

In my dream I was

a child in that little town too.  

I remember seeing it all,

though I’m told I was too young to remember.

I kept a shard of wing,

evidence that something had once

fallen from the sky

in a place

where nothing ever happened.

I woke up from my dream

when my wife

crawled under the warm covers

in the room where I sleep

when I can’t sleep.

Those are the few gifted moments

when I can return to any dream.

In this one I hear the town's

gathered prayers of thanks

for deliverance from a Piper Cub

and a man with no business up so high,

him afraid of heights.