The Airplane Model

By Sherwin W. Howard

First Place All-Church Poetry Contest

I remember

My father built a model plane,

One of those rubber-powered ones

That grow out of a hundred bits

Of balsa wood and paper held by glue,

And it flew.

I remember

A card table in the front room

And watching from my child-space

While he cut and pinned and shaped

A thousand fractured moments into place,

And it flew.

I remember

The cool spring Saturday we went

Outside, conspirators in flight,

Propeller wound to nearly snap,

Its wings held up to brush the morning air,

And it flew.

I remember

The soaring arc that climbed past age

Above the narrow city streets

And rushed headlong into a wind

That cut across an ever-widening sky,

And it flew.

I remember

The ladder and broom that brushed it down

From shingles where it crashed midway

Along a path from man to boy.

I watched tight-lipped, while shouting loud inside,

It flew, oh Dad, it flew.

Photography by Longin Lonczyna