High Flight - by John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of; wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sun-lit silence. Hovering there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air;
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark nor even eagle flew;
And while, with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God

This poem, which I've known and loved for a long time, is featured in the Writer's Almanac this morning. Garrison Keillor reads it in the kind of downbeat manner which is at odds with the sheer exhiliration of the piece. Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr. died in a training accident in December 1941. The poem was sent by Magee in a letter to his parents about three months before his death with the note; "It started at 30,000 feet, and was finished soon after I landed. I thought it might interest you." The scribbled poem was "High Flight."

Whenever I read this poem I always think of Magee's parents. He was only nineteen when his plane crashed, in England, in a training accident. You can see from his picture that he was a handsome boy. And how gifted he was. To lose such a beautiful child must have been truly devastating. Why do I dwell their loss? I suppose that it is because I have two sons of my own. My oldest is about a year older than John Magee was in 1941, and the younger boy is just fourteen. And it's every parent's fate that, whenever we reflect on such tragedies, be it airmen in war or schoolchildren abducted by evil men, or any of a million other terrible things which could befall our loved ones , we feel these as though they are happening to our own. Glimpses of horror visit us and we push them away before they overwhelm us. And then we want to hug our children to us and tell them we love them and just ... be careful, OK! And they look at us as if we are the child and tell us not to be silly, and they walk out of the door and down the street as if they own the world, like John Gillespie Magee Jr. owned it in September 1941.