Takeoff

by John Grey

She's seventy and it's her first flight.

She's never believed those great

hunks of metal could really

break the bounds of gravity.

Not even her eyes staring up at the sky these years

could tell her different.

Thrust and elevation are meaningless terms to her.

And now she's strapped in.

She can't leave. She can hardly move.

She remembers the heart-attack,

not five years old by this.

She was fastened so tightly lo the hospital bed.

Her arms were a mass of tubes.

A machine at her bedside

pretended to be her heart.

Doctors, nurses kept telling her she'd be okay.

Then she'd see them off in the corner,

looking at her chart,

shaking their heads.

Did pilots, stewards, go through

the very same motions?

"It's perfectly safe," her daughter whispers.

They once said the same about life.