Monday, November 4, 2013

Daily Prompt: Airport Time

We watch ice melt in clear plastic cups embossed Frontier or United. 
Calculate the time change. 
How often men debate free will and destiny through history. Both end when we end. 
Before long there will be no one to carry a letter.

These lines are from my poem "Distance." The poem first appeared in Solo Novo and was selected by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (clmp) for Taste Test. 

Read the full poem here.

This is not a Day Poem but the result of an accretion of days: I've taken hundreds of transcontinental flights between California, my adopted home, and Washington, D.C., the place I left.

Airports and flights are rich sources of poems. If you are traveling, talk with your seat mate. On a recent flight between North Carolina and Sacramento, a veteran of the Iraq war told me the story of the most brutal death he witnessed and the hardest choice he'd had to make as a combat medic. I asked him if I could use his story in a poem. He graciously said, yes. I'm working on it.

As you walk around an airport, take advantage of the strange feeling of being temporarily in and out of time, a feeling poems also evoke.

Daily Prompt: Traveling, talk with people. Slip out of time. Read a volume of poems. Jot some rhymes and images. Make airport time poetry time.

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