The Airplane Model
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.
[photo] Photography by Longin Lonczyna
For Bread and Breath of Life
Third Place All-Church Poetry Contest
“Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.” (2 Cor. 4:10)
Our God who flamed within a tree
And spoke the law to shape our way,
We consecrate this hour to thee
And ask thy hearing as we pray.
Our Brother nailed upon a tree,
We eat and drink, and view thy death,
And live thy law in love, that we
May all be quickened by thy breath.
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