Flight Path
Poetry
by Louise Warren
Flight Path
His first time in the glider
tiny flecked rocks
an enormous dark blue dark outpouring of sea.
This was real emotion
rolled up in a bolt of white air
thermal, engulfed by a staggering singular force.
It bears him in a muscular, thundering embrace,
compresses his breath,
this was sex , fury, joy.
A drop of pressure and up swung a vertebra of cliff,
snatches of field through a torn cloud,
water, land, sky, sloped.
That gull disturbed from its nest
imagine!
The world tipped upside down.
His hand on the lever, that freedom to fall,
to return again over Cornwall
earth and heaven.
Peter Lanyon was born in St Ives in 1918. He was a full-time artist and part time glider. This poem is inspired by one of his gliding paintings. ‘Thermal’.
About the Author
Louise Warren’s first collection A Child’s Last Picture of the Zoo won the Cinnamon Press debut poetry competition in 2012. A pamphlet, In the scullery with John Keats, was also published by Cinnamon in 2016. Her poems have been widely published in magazines, including Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, Stand, Poetry Wales and Rialto. In 2018, she won first prize in the ‘Prole Laureate Poetry Competition’ with her poem ‘The Marshes’, which appears in the pamphlet John Dust, illustrated by the artist John Duffin 2019 by V.Press. Her latest poetry pamphlet is Sometime, in a Churchyard, a collaboration with the artist Charlotte Harker 2023, published by Paekakariki Press. Visit Louise’s website or find her on Twitter.