Flight 370

Imagine if you can, on this the sad first

Anniversary of the Boston Marathon  bombing,

That you were one of the passengers,

Numbering 227 according to Malaysia Airlines,

On the doomed Flight 370,

Flying in a sleek Boeing 777, with robin-egg blue wings

In the middle of the night, on  March 18, 2014,

Flying from the  capital Kuala Lumpur,

To Beijing, some 2700 hundred miles away.

Imagine you were young or old,

Male or female, mostly of Chinese

Or of Malaysian descent,

Or one of  the contingent of Indians

Or one of the couple of Ukrainians,

Or  the 51-year-old IBM executive

From the Dallas-Fort Worth area,

From which he’d just returned

After visiting his ex- and two sons,

And was  returning to  Beijing,

To take care of some unfinished business.

He’d spent the last two years in Beijing

Before being transferred to Kuala Lumpur,

The last career move he’d ever make,

Or that you are one of the teen-age couple,

She Asian and beautiful, he European

And doting hopelessly on her,

Who are returning to school in France

From  a vacation on a travel poster beach

Where their footprints in the sand lead

To a sanctuary  in the dunes where they lie on their backs

Looking up at the  blue sky and dissolving  vapor trail

Of a jet that is too high for itself to be seen,

As if it was  disappearing into eternity.

Or imagine you were one of the twenty

Younger Chinese and Malaysian employees

Of an Austin-based semi-conductor company

With an assembly and test-plant in Tianjin.

Or if semi-conductors are not your thing,

Imagine you are the Hollywood stunt man,

Chinese, of course, like Bruce Lee,

Flying to Beijing to see his two kids

Before he flies  back to Malaysia

To film the Netflix series “Marco Polo.”

Or you are the Siberian diving instructor,

Also the father of two kids, on his way home

From a trip to Bali, Indonesia, back to  Irkutsk, in Siberia,

Where he was a member of a  tight-knit Jewish community.

Or imagine you are the pregnant passenger,

Or the one recovering from a miscarriage,

Or that you are the four-year-old sister,

Or her two-year-old brother, the youngest on board.

They were born in America, but their last name was Chinese,

But their first names were  Nicole and Leo.

Or imagine you are the second-oldest passenger,

A 76-year-old Chinese man who has survived

A truck collision, political persecution, and three heart attacks.

He  was one of  the artistic contingent of twenty,

Who were returning from an art exhibit in Kuala Lumpur.

Among the twenty  was an unemployed factory worker

Who managed to save enough to learn calligraphy.

Or imagine you were one of the two younger men

Who were returning to China to visit dying fathers,

Or one of the two older couples who were expecting

Soon to become grandparents, or the young couple

Who had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary,

Or the Indian microbiologist who was flying for the first time

Along with her retired husband and youngest son

Who were on their way  to Beijing to attend the graduation

Of her oldest son, with a degree in engineering,

Or imagine you are  the 29-year-old Iranian

Who  was traveling to Germany illegally,

With a stolen passport, seeking asylum, hoping

To be reunited with his mother, already there.

Imagine that you were any of these passengers one hour

Into  the flight when the plane lost contact

With air traffic control  and disappeared from radar

For the next next seven hours,  or so

The authorities speculated, and flew toward

The South China Sea, or the Indian Ocean,

Or  god only knows where it went down

At sometime not long after dawn

When the plane finally ran out of gas,

Following what some will  believe was God’s will,

And others that a fanatic among the passengers

Or crew felt they were following God’s will

In prolonging the terror  as long as possible,

And mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers,

Young and the old, right-brained and left-brained

The artistically  talented and technically inclined,

The well-to-do and the barely making it,

The happy and the unhappy, the well and the ill,

Chinese, Malaysians, Indians, Indonesians,

And a quotient  of Caucasians,

Somebody’s  near and dear loved ones

Or distant and now dead relatives,

Reminding  us of the terrible things that can happen

To ordinary people, members of our species,

Enduring the  boredom or the frustration,

The divorces, deaths, and diseases

Of their quotidian existence

But suddenly lifted by technology

Along with the 450 ton aircraft  with robin-egg blue wings,

Astonishingly 36,000  feet up in the air,

Cruising at 570 miles an hour

And  held hostage  by an insane person or persons,

Drunk on god and religion, with messianic delusions,

Just as millions of brainwashed believers

Belonging to three crazy, competing teams

That are all in the same  crazy  league,

Playing with  weapons of mass destruction,

Holding humanity at large hostage

As  planet earth speeds around the sun

At  67,000  thousand miles  an hour.

Imagine if you can that technology is a pact

With the devil who is monitoring our smart phones

And running in-flight movies in our minds

While  annihilation approaches exponentially

Until  we are like the passengers on Flight 370,

Whom we never knew but  have already forgotten—

The old artist who survived three heart attacks,

Little Leo who has not yet learned to count,

The  passengers who are flying for the first time

The teenagers on their backs, looking up at the blue sky,

The unemployed worker who learned calligraphy,

And  the 42-year-old  woman whose birthday it was,
Who will never have to play the numbers game again.

                                                Robert Forrey,  April 2014