the certainity and truth of flight.

Taken just outside Regan National in Washington, D.C. One can get right under the landing path of the airlines, which was damn damn cool.

Taken from this spot Google Satellite Map.

The Flight
by Pablo Neruda

Hands shading eyes,
I follow the high flight:
honoring heaven, the bird
traverses
the transparency, without soiling the day.
Winging westward, it climbs
each step up to the naked blue:
the entire sky is its tower,
and the world is cleansed by its movement.

Though the violent bird
seeks blood in the rose of space,
its structure is
arrow and flower in flight
and in the light its wings
are fused with air and purity.

O feathers destined
not to tree, meadow, or combat,
or to the atrocious ground
or sweatshop,
but to the conquest
of a transparent fruit!

I celebrate the sky dance
of gulls and petrels
attired in snow
as though I had
a standing invitation:
I participate
in their velocity and repose,
in the pause and haste of snow.

What flies in me is manifest
in the errant equation of those wings.

O wind aside the black condor's
iron flight in the mist!
Whistling wind that transposed
the hero's murderous scimitar:
you receive the harsh flight's blow
like a coat of armor plate,
repeat its menace in the sky
until all becomes blue again.

The flight of a dart,
every swallow's mission,
flight of the nightingale and its sonata,
the cockatoo and its showy crest.

Hummingbirds flying in a looking glass
stir sparkling emeralds,
and flying through the dew
the partridge shakes
the mint's green soul.

I, who learned to fly with every flight
of pure professors
in the woods, at sea, in the ravines,
on my back in the sand,
or in dreams,
remained here, tied
to the roots,
to the magnetic mother, the earth,
lying to myself
and flying
only within,
alone and in the dark.

A plant dies and is buried again,
man's feet return to the terrain,
only wings evade death.

The world is a crystal sphere,
if he does not fly man loses his way---
cannot understand transparency.
That is why I profess
unconfined clarity
and from the birds I learned
passionate hope,
the certainity and truth of flight.

[edited]