AN ARRIVAL AT ELSTREE AERODROME

(First published in “Control Column” 1967; re-published in “Winged Words” February 1974)
 
Silver dull, grey dull, dull green
British decent and dowdy in watered silk and bombazine
Elderly lady-aeroplanes, small-boned and sprightly
live in their decent retirement, the years touching them lightly.
 
Cloistered in High-church hangars, dusty and properly mellow
where sunlight sounds like organ notes; calm, old-gold and yellow
In a pot-pourri of petrol, old-lace and attar-of-roses
the ladies look kindly down their long and aristocratic noses.
 
- Making a masculine entrance, roaring like King Kong
a Cessna Three-ten! Yankee, youthful and strong
in Caribbean color, - hi-tone, two-tone, bold as brass.
- “Hiya gals. Dig the Drag! Like crazy. Whatta GASS …!”
 
“REALLY!” Murmur the shocked congregation
hearts fluttering in ladylike agitation
“Really!” As persons of breeding, Auster, de Havilland, Miles
disapprove with the primmest of, possible smiles …
 
Elderly British aeroplanes primly and properly neat,
Elderly lady-aeroplanes, proper and primly discreet
consider the Cessna, - silenced now: in cathedral gloom
glittering like a gaudy sin. The afternoon
lengthens to a gentle haze of OTHER skies and other days.
 
“Emily dear, do you remember Hendon, ’38?
- That Display in September
and that sprightly Avro biplane?
… Oh, he was BOLD! …”
- AND ‘Emily dear’ feels, suddenly,
sadly old …

 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: When published in “Control Column” the title of this poem was “Incident at Elstree”, and line 3 of stanza 2 read “In a scent of petrol, imagined old-lace and attar-of-roses”.]

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