[lit-ideas] Re: Sunday Poem

Welcome to the Galapagos
When for lots of dollars, the lurable having allowed themselves to become the lured, and having caught their breath and several planes, been cataloged, ticketed, boarded, shepherded into tubes that have seat pitches designed not particularly for discomfort but neither for its opposite either, some folk somewhat inured to passage by business and repetition and bags and bags of nuts, others experiencing baptism in the novelties of flight, they all emerge onto the runway like Darwinian finch chicks, confused about time and how to adapt, the view is volcanic, the atmosphere, though desert clear, is clouded by dry eyes and recent memory, which says it isn't even even odds that here is where they are, or that their ripe imaginations have finally given birth to this experience. Everything about the airport's emptiness is far too unlikely, and the usual clues, hints that homo sapiens exist and are breakfasting elsewhere, are few: a plane with a Nescafe logo painted along its length, some flat-roofed concrete buildings, the usual luggage tenders. For a split second or two they are a hundred motley members of a tribe, pilgrims emerged from a tunnel onto a bewildering piece of tarmac-coated lava. And then, because they really are finally here, one at a time they pull themselves together and arrive, totter into customs to pay their national park fees. 

David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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