Late Arrivals

It is early in the morning
and the airport is unaccustomed
to arrivals quite this late.

You are the only one who waited
for yesterday’s plane. Somewhere
there is a security guard. He is asleep.

You should be. Storms and miscommunications
have filled the night with uncertainty.
It is too far home to leave and come back,

so here you are. The ticker board changing hourly,
a cat and mouse game we all know are lies.
But we just have to wait it out

Because truth eventually outs.
Sometimes quickly with trumpet flares,
more often slowly, like dead men

rising in the water. Uncomfortable
but at least, at last, you get answers.
At last, you know what to do

even if it is too late
with a long journey home.

About this poem.

My son is flying in for a few days. His five thirty in the afternoon flight landed finally at one this morning. Then we drove the hour and half home. The conversations we might have had were replaced by exhaustion and talkingjust enough to stay awake.

So the poem is about that. And about now often in life we never get answers, or at best incomplete answers to things in our lives that have come undone. I almost called in “an incomplete history”, but that was too obvious.

I used to say, when I managed companies, that 90% of what went wrong on projects was not about what went wrong, but about poor communication about what went wrong. I still think I was right.

Be well,

Tom

PS: Yes, the picture was taken at the airport last night (or early this morning).