Thursday Short Poem: Maginnes’ “Airport Chapels”

I’ve been lucky these last few years to do a lot of traveling.  I love traveling — and in the past year six months alone, have been blessed to be on five different continents — but no matter what the class of service, I don’t like the actual experience of flying.

I do like airports, however.  I like exploring, always hunting for the unique in places that are deliberately designed to be anything but.  I always try and pop my head into airport chapels, too.  This week’s poem, from Al Maginnes, is perfect.

Airport Chapels

Mostly they are filled by the waiting we hope occupies
            the relatives and lovers
at the flight’s other end. Plain, vaguely Christian in design,
            tiny churches
professing no denomination, offer nothing to frighten off
            a skittish Catholic
or stubborn back-row Baptist. I can never resist
            looking in
the same way my eyes always rake Playboy’s cover,
            hoping in both cases
to spy what is usually hidden. The nervous might invest
            a moment there
in the same spirit they might once have purchased
            the flight insurance
you could buy in airports. While the skycap wrestled
            your luggage, you could write
a check and drop it in a steel box, so that if your plane exploded
            your survivors would be
taken care of.  I’ve never taken haven in those rooms,
            never gone in
to offer even a quick prayer to the gods of light while
            my hand makes
the sign of the cross, “a slow four" my jazz friend calls it.
            His wife told me
about praying for him in the chapel of a hospital,
            another building
filled with souls in transit, while he murmured words
            out of a language
he barely speaks. He came back to his body,
            saying nothing
of where he’d been, cursing the suddenly resistant
            doors and staircases
of the world. The task of airports is not resistance
            but absorption,
so that we are swallowed by the time between flights.
            We can eat
half a dozen bad versions of regional cuisine
            or buy
the unnecessary in an assortment of stores or drink
             in a fake Irish pub.
Or we can yield to the claim churches make
             to owning
some corner of the eternal and find refuge from
             the shuffle
of the terminal, the endless loop of CNN, the garble
             of arrival and departure,
and hide in the cul-de-sac of a room with a plain altar,
             fake stained glass,
a rail where one might kneel to imagine communion.
             The cross,
if there is a cross, will not be adorned by a body.
             Nothing here will
remind us how quickly flesh turns to mortal ruin
             or that in an hour
someone standing on the ground will look up
             to trace
the small cross-shape of the plane burning
             across the vast
desert of sky, tiny spark that, for the length
             of the flight, holds
my faith and the faith of everyone on board,
             a hope
as clear as the silver cross nestled against the throat
             of the ticket agent
who took my bag and wished me a safe flight, the small
             blessing all travelers pray for.