Effortlessly the buzzard strokes
the midway air,
each wingtip’s splayed feather
darkly visible where,
above the concrete apron
and the parched earth
splashed with poppies
and those flowers known as
the eyebrows of Zeus,
it tilts and rides the thermals,
above the runway’s game-board
shapes of the geometer,
cone and cylinder,
dihedral, rhombus, delta,
whose skin-deep miracles of surface
sufficed for us to fly,
as a blue-suited man
puts his head in the mouth of an engine
that has crossed an ocean,
turns away and pops a Pez in his mouth.
