By CS Crowe
Before we knew we lived beneath the airport,
We spent our nights wishing on shooting stars,
Red and blinking, sleepless eyes in the night—
We never understood why our father laughed at us.
He turned out the porch light, and we sat in darkness,
The summer night, like loose coffee grounds,
Sticky beneath our tongues and in between our teeth:
Frogs hunted the crickets; hoot owls hunted the frogs.
The whippoorwill sang like palmettos and wild palms.
How could we have ever noticed the rumble of planes?
Have you noticed the lovebugs do not fill the air in June?
The frogs do not form braille poems on the front porch,
And some nights, the crickets sing without a reply.
Only our father's laughter and the airplanes remain,
The smell of coffee brewing in a carafe after dinner,
The tick of a lonely truck engine in a driveway for two.
The palmettos weep for want of the whippoorwill's song.
The airplanes weep for want of wishes that do not come.
Somewhere, we struggle to fall asleep in too deep a silence.
Our father and our mother, they turn off the porch light,
They know something is missing here, beneath the airport,
But they cannot admit they are the ones who drove us away.
We lived atop a hill so steep we could not see the bottom.
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CS Crowe is a storyteller from the Southeastern United States with a love of nature and a passion for writing. He believes stories and poems are about getting there, not being there, and he enjoys those tales that take their time getting to the point.