The first prize in our annual members’ poetry competition this year was awarded by external judge Cheryl Moskowitz to Susan Wicks’s poem, Flying into Charlotte.
Flying into Charlotte
We are encased in grey,
the cloud so low it swirls
almost at ground level, while our height
ticks down from almost 40,000 feet
through thirties, twenties – years
to go – until at 14,000, thirteen, twelve,
a city’s laid-out lives
are swallowed up by fog,
revealed again and swallowed.
Finally the runway coming up
to meet us – clear – and blotted out
then clear again in patches – gone.
But we are almost down
then down, our wing-flaps rising,
engines revving to the max
until we slow and gently bump along
at last, and come to rest.
And now our hearts can stop.
Susan Wicks
Cheryl's comments on Sue's poem were as follows: I have chosen ‘Flying into Charlotte’ as first prize winner. It is a poem that continued to grow on me on successive readings. I was immediately taken in by that arresting last line, ‘And now our hearts can stop’ but needed time to really absorb the significance of all the numbers and technical details that come before in the poem. I am not, naturally, a numbers sort of person, but the deliberate use of them in this poem, written as both words and figures, intrigued me. Every word (and indeed, every number) is carefully chosen and resonates with meaning. ‘Flying into Charlotte’ manages to encompass the whole of life, what it is to have lived and eventually, to come to the end, a landing place. It does so with the lightest of touch, leaving the reader to find their own meaning. Charlotte is a city in North Carolina, and I presume it is a place that is familiar to the speaker - perhaps their place of birth. The plane in the poem is both real and metaphorical, a vehicle that carries us, holds us up and transports us great distances until finally setting us down at our destination. Just as our bodies, our physical selves do as we grow, develop, and mature through life. The plane in the poem reverses that process, brings us down to earth again, to the place of our beginning, ‘until we slow and gently bump along/ at last, and come to rest.’ Marvellous!
The Kent & Sussex Poetry Society 