MIRIAM CRAIG

Aerodynamics

My friend who is an engineer
can’t bring herself to analyse
when in a plane, just how that plane
stays in the sky.

She knows the angle of the wings,
the necessary lift and thrust,
but from her seat the engines seem
to run on trust.

There are certain facts the brain
can't hold aloft: love lost, love changed.
Perhaps, how I’m still living when I
feel this pain.

One day the seat-belt sign pings on
and to get dressed is to believe
in soaring clouds where things exist
that cannot be.

We breathe and eat and sleep,
our feet on miles of nothing there.
Griefs hold us; our lives hang in them
as planes in air.

Prediction

I believe that one day I will wake up
and feel exactly like an ocean,
my hair fizzing,
breath silvering into steam.

I'll be on a flat beach,
will pack up my bivvy bag,
my stove that is crunchy with sand,
and will set off at a stride towards the trees.

The light through the canopy
throws cut-outs, sharp or weak.
I take my time with a pie wrapped in foil,
an apple, a flask of tea

and when the air sweats up a storm,
it doesn't matter how mud sticks,
how my boots whip
their tiny seas

because I leave the footpath as easily
as water veining through a leaf.
The undergrowth mutters its secrets,
terse and sweet.  

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Miriam Craig is a poet and children’s writer from London. Her poetry has been published in Obsessed With Pipework, Crossways and Scintilla and she was part of the writing team who created My Golden Ticket, a children’s book published by start-up Wonderbly in conjunction with the Roald Dahl Estate.