WINGS OF DESIRE

A recent conversation, about a local arts event that may have as its theme the subject of flight, prompted this short poem.

The Wright brothers, Orville (1871–1948) and Wilbur (1867–1912), were two American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building and flying the world's first successful aeroplane.
They made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA.

 











TWO BOYS

Nearly midnight, folk are sleeping;
brothers whisper in the darkness
while their siblings drowse like puppies
and their parents snore and rumble.
Seven Hawthorn Street in Dayton
hums with energy and crackle;
Bishop’s Boys, Wilbur and Orville,
once again are talking nonsense,
crazy dreams of birdlike exploits
freeing them from terra firma
and from gravity and boredom ...
how they’d soar with wings like buzzards
up above the dusty backyards,
up above the town church steeple,
higher than the swirling soot-spook
from the morning locomotive, 
higher than the proud flag flying
on the Day of Independence.
Two boys safe in bed, unsleeping,
prey to wild imagination:
aviators, free as angels
fly towards the gates of Heaven.