The Friday Poem on 24/06/22
We chose ‘Airborne’ by Mary Mulholland to be our Friday Poem this week because we love a nice villanelle, and the form — five tercets plus a final quatrain with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeated alternately in following stanzas — feels entirely appropriate to the content. Mulholland doesn’t rhyme, and she adapts her repeating lines to suit her purpose. This looseness, and the repetition, both serve to underline the mental and emotional state of the man described, who is bound up in memories of his wartime experience as a paratrooper, and also reflects the relationship between the poet and the man. It’s tender, eloquent and affecting.
Airborne
Tell me about when they dropped you and you flew
to the mud-banks of the Ijssel near Arnhem,
scarcely more than a child, with parachute wings.
By your bedside you still have a book: The Psychology
of Fear: How to Overcome It, first edition, well-thumbed.
What was it like to be dropped and to fly?
I heard your landing was softened by bodies.
Operation Market Garden. What are your memories
of that child who flew with ivory parachute wings?
When I took you back, we watched geese gliding,
effortless to the banks, rising again. Unlike when
they dropped you and you flew, and your friends.
And now, each night with helmet and truncheon
you prowl the house – they’re invading upstairs,
coming after that child with ivory parachute wings.
We take tea outside, like when I was the child.
You pick a dandelion and we watch the seeds fall –
they’ve dropped you, and you’re flying –
scarcely more than a child, with parachute wings.
