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Joanne Limburg

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A Lesson in Ballooning

First of all (the instructor said),
we should forget the myth we’d learned
in school that only the best could fly.

Quite the opposite was true
and by the end of the morning, everyone
in that room would rediscover

her God-given power to leave the ground.
He smiled at us, a nodding circle
of earnest girls in ethnic skirts,
split us into groups of four
and took the lid off his marker pen.
I admit I was sceptical at first:

the uplifting quotes I could take or leave,
the hugging just embarrassed me
but then, quite abruptly – just before coffee –

I felt the ground release my feet...
...and I was up with a rush of air:
easy as stepping out of a shoe

to shed the room, the building, the street
and rise until the London I’d left
was just a teeming A-Z.

The city’s asthmatic wheeze grew faint
as I breathed in the pure, blue
laughing gas of almost heaven.

Dusk fell. I drifted lazily
over the green belt. Then I discovered
that I couldn’t feel my toes,

had slipped, quite gently, out of my skin
like a tomato in boiling water.
At once I was vomiting sunset

as if I were a spoilt birthday
girl, puking up the trifle.
The whole of the sky was my head and it ached.

Suddenly I was nostalgic for ceilings,
yearning for home, with all its walls
and for someone to break my upward fall.

 

Page(s) 50-51

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