JOURNEY INTO SPACE

I read this very visual poem, one of my personal favourites, in the second half of Guernsey's Open Mic event last Monday. 
It's taken from my second poetry collection, Strange Journey.

RAPTURE

There are no trumpets; it’s all very low-key:
no spectral horsemen or multi-headed beasts.
Men and women simply drift away
like dandelion-seeds on a soft breeze,
one by one at first,
then gradually
the sky fills up with them: a surrealist painting,
multitudes rising through indescribable blue,
pale clouds adrift in the background.

Youths in baseball-caps, men with umbrellas, girls in patterned dresses,
daft old ladies, school-boys, postmen, beggars: 
all are lifted up.
Two nuns, like magpies, joyfully rise.
Machine operators, shopkeepers, farmers, dog-walkers, policemen, joggers,
young women with tired faces, suddenly beatific:
all float upwards.
 
They rise heroically,
each in an orb of shining light:
the only movement in a world
suddenly
stilled.

Traffic becomes gridlocked; 
jet-planes hang suspended
in charged air;
all the birds of the earth fall silent
as the expanding sky
grows brighter, brighter,
brighter yet.

Thessalonians 4:15 - 17