Viennese Journal 12.0 - Chasing Sunrise: A Night Flight to the Land of Shelly

Last year, in April 2012, I went to England and then Vienna for the first time as a delegate for the Friends World Committee for Consultation to the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice. I started blogging about the journey and called those blogs Viennese Journals. 

My wife, Kerry and I, are back in London, returning to the United Nations and experiencing a little more of London and Vienna first. I hope to resume the Journals.

I was reading some Percy Shelly on Night Flight to London and wrote this poem.

 

Hurling across the sullen sea

Into a lurking darkness
Phantoms of four hundred minutes
Passing in long succession

This metal monstrosity of a bird,

A flying Frankenstein
Oppressed by an awe-full silence
Consuming the night
Like the suffocating darkness
of a dying flame

What fierce spells

Give rise to this flight?
-         With no comfort of the gazing stars
or wandering moon

Disturbed only
By the occasional bump
of the creeping wind
 
Soaring high above
This pale pool of tears
Its utter silence suggests
What no words can express

Sprinting through the air

We catch a glimmer
Ever so faint
Light dissolving rapidly
Into pools of roses and purple hued smiles

This chopping and mixing

Of fragments of four seasons
Rushing on in our pursuit of Day
The blurring of hours

Time measures cut short

And repeated quickly

We find day and land

Arriving, and now longing

For the piercing cry
Of a broken hearted violin