Bonnie Bowers

image by SueAnn

Bonnie Bowers

Little Bonnie Bowers used to watch

her Daddy fly his biplane out over

their family fields, dusting crops

with a thick greenish-gray mist,

looping, spinning, climbing, diving,

tilting the restrutted wings on the

bright brown Boeing Stearman,

tingling with delight 

when he would glide effortlessly 

to the flat spot behind their hay barn,

knowing it was Saturday, 

her turn to fly too,

standing there tall at ten, 

her white leather aviatrix helmet cap 

buttoned snugly under her dimpled chin, 

her white girlie bomber jacket zipped up, 

her “Bonnie” name tag stitched on 

with pink thread over her excited heart, 

her tomboy head swimming with images

of primitive microrapters flexing their 

greenish-gray flight feathers,

of murderous biplanes forcing Cary Grant

face down in the Dakota mud,

the silliness of Snoopy in his Sopwith Camel

cruising proudly in the skies of Cartoonland,

those wood nymph fairies that fluttered

lovingly around her blond curls within

her daydreams like sentient humming butterflies,

each overlapping madly 

as her father’s wheels left the ground,

the wind pressing against her white goggles,

rising strong above the checkerboard fields,

the windbreak trees rows and rail fences,

the sun-kissed silos, the pinto speckles 

of several dairy herds, rising, lifting,

winging like a pink and white angel

toward cotton candy clouds, and above,

bursting into a blue sky so beautiful

it always made her weep as she searched

the horizon for hawks, eagles, and red barons,

her rainbow-colored knit scarf flapping sweetly,

popping like the folded queen of hearts

in the pink spokes of her front bike tire,

as her father manned the flight stick

and her mother waved from the front porch,

a mere matronly dot below, and her joy

was still swelling, surging, singing,

nearly inexorable.

Glenn Buttkus

November 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets

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