"Hudson River, January 15, 2009, 3:30 p.m." by Donn Saylor

And from gelid iron skies, the pearly
insistence of the Airbus 320 glided
(there’s no other word for it), creamily,
into the boreal Hudson:
archangel banished on an augustly controlled
descent.
Just after takeoff, the pilot – Svengali in
the clouds, no doubt, all but seducing the
coy strati, plump, today, with new snow –
reported a “double bird strike”; then,
moments later, to the souls onboard who were,
this January afternoon, masquerading as
people: “Brace for
impact.”
The impact, as it turned out, was a soft
settling onto a watery tarmac: shallow,
icy, but a great pair of steely arms for a
wayward plane to find its peace after such
bedlam.
And it is the thought of such bedlam – so
adamant, so absolute – that brings me a gutful
of forked-tongued terror whenever I fly. There
has always seemed, to me, something
not right
about a mighty, mighty manmade flying machine
that can be disquieted so easily by “choppy air”,
that can be victim to any number of altitudinous
Armageddons,
that can be felled by a flock of turned-around
sparrows. My fourth grade history teacher once
recounted the story of a race between the then-new
steam engine and the seemingly archaic horse. The horse,
as we all know, won the race.
And sometimes, birds
can be horses too.

© 2008 by Donn Saylor