airport manuscripts: a poem
Nicole Seto is a student and poet, studying at the University of Cambridge
in the rigid vessel, i watch planes and people disappear
in a flash of empty blue. the year
is a palimpsest of experience;
memories braiding
into the margins of the person i had been
the last time, when my fingers traced
the ink of this golden ticket. amidst the damp
rattle of wheels carrying me
toward a place that is both
home and not-home, i am one of many pilgrim
birds, steel-boned and spread-eagled,
waiting for winter. the hushed narrow maze
of corridors
becomes drenched in nervous light. on cue,
we fasten ourselves to the mechanical feathers.
moments sketch themselves over older moments:
the silent
tiptoe of English rain across
skin that remembers the batter
of tropical storms.
the rising lilt of
my voice as my tongue acclimatised
faster than the rest of me, and i imagined
my words, too, carried on colossal wings, beating
their way along the solitary ocean.
later, an explosion of sunburnt
leaves draped themselves over the broad, barren
scribblings of the penitential months,
and i found laughter in odd corners;
in a crack of light coloured
against the back of my palm, in the murmur of a
thousand mayflies.
as i lurch away from the tarmac
the rush of sound - the slice of metal against
sky - the unnatural levitation
that is somehow
motionless - lets my malleable
self believe, for an air-borne vacant second,
that home and not-home
has acquired a stillness, that i
have learnt to read the nearly
discernible markings, that experience
simply awaits definition.
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