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Carolyn Waudby

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Superfortress

B29 reconnaissance plane;
four Wright cyclone engines, thirteen crew-cut boys
who did not heed the dark, the bleak, the sucking of the jet peat.

She singed the heather;
scattered bone-metal splinters into the peat’s fissures,
blew alloy to the wind like dandelion clocks.

                                                     *
The frayed edges of a tyre ripple in the cold like a spent firework.
Black eye sockets stare from a page –
the cylinders of burnt out engines, photographed in monochrome,

Skulls wondering
how they ended up a monument
on this collied landscape,

while poppies on the aircraft’s prow
remind us it was not exceptional, or splendid,
above or beyond place, or time.

Words on a sign:
They probably never even saw the ground.



 

Superfortress RB-29A (F-13A) 16th Reconnaissance Squadron USAF crashed on Shelfmoor, off Snake Pass, in 1948. It is one of many aircraft wreck sites scattered throughout the Peak District National Park.

Page(s) 36

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