Kwame Dawes, Flight

Closing Ceremony, Yuna Kim, Unceremonious Silver (Olympic Poetry)" ws featured on Wall Street Journal today. It featured poet Kwame Dawes's poem about Sochi Winter Olympics and its aftermath called "Flight" on their website today.

FLIGHT

Prologue

And in the end,

for all the tears

the scandals

the national pride,

the canned narratives,

the myth of glory

all that remains

for this witness

is the poetry

of bodies risking

everything in them

to defy the yanking

pull of gravity—

the atrophy, the decay,

the sheer inevitability

of our deaths—and in this

defiance is the lasting

thing—the games, the holy

games of our splendid hubris.

 

1

Below them, their insect bodies

etched into the sky—

limbs, tentacles, and the graceful

lean forward—

from here they are doing nothing

short of the miracle

 

of flight, and we, too, rejoice in this

safe and miraculous

landing in the dust of snow—the cowbells

welcome them home.

2

There is no need

for the whisper

of slow motion

to teach us the fluid

kinesis of these

swooping

speed skaters,

balancing the world

on the thin edge

of a blade, one stroke

at a time, in constant

torque,

turning gravity

into a play thing—

this is purified speed.

3

When a woman collapses

on the unwelcome bed of snow,

her body broken by the last

painful dig and pull

 

across the shifting dust,

you know she has died

 

to everything else in her

but the will to cross

that stain of red to the anthem

of the clanging crowd.

4

for Yuna Kim

And when she said softly,

that she was happy now

that it was over, this

when she had lost the gold,

and the bedlam around

her told her she was cheated,

I believed her, believed

her relief, her sense that

the weight of it all

was now gone, that the queen

unburdened of the stone

around her to tutor

her body through pain

and to carry the flame

of envy, anger, awe and fear

inside her, stoking it

for years and years

as a flame—that this was

over now, and all she felt

was relief, gladness, and peace—

when she said, I am happy,

it is over, I believed her.

And she, skateless,

mortal, grounded, she walked,

stuttering and ordinary,

away from the arena.

 

Epilogue

Closing ceremony

There is a boat,

there is a harlequin

there are children

there is the contraption

of our vanity—

the mechanicals

have arrived

and we cheer

the flying boat—

the ritual and pomp

the presidents

and prime ministers

with the cost of blood

in their heads,

the officials

dispensing weed

to calm our nerves

and the vanquished

and triumphant,

the significant

and insignificant,

the strings, the oboes,

the flutes, and the wash

of alarums from the horns;

we land, we land, we land.