The terror of the serene planes is in their eyes:
look deeply, see the wings dip, and the revolving nose
split sky and cloud, ten thousand feet above
the remembered city of women with violent hearts,
incredibly aged children, dark-eyed, who recall
the propeller’s sound and the panic
from the days of the womb’s darkness.
The eyes contain, reflect more than the image photographed
in the almanacs, the newspapers, the albums airmen are fond of.
The joy of the plunge through mist into sun is unknown to
the wide anonymous eyes of the dwellers in bombed cities.
The eyes reveal everything: the superhuman grace
of the silver flight, and the first melodic hum,
deceitful, cruel, of the synchronized guns and motors
and the arc-plummet fall of the bombs, the grotesque explosion,
the hysteria of the insane siren, the last deception.
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