The Airplane Model

This is a poem that I took out of an old Ensign.  It had won a poetry contest.  It was one of my favorite poems for like--forever. . .it is by Sherwin W. Howard

I remember
My father built a model plane,
One of those rubber-powered ones
That grow out of a hundred bits
Of balsa wood and paper held by glue,
And it flew.

I remember
A card table in the front room
And watching from my child-space
While he cut and pinned and shaped
A thousand fractured moments into place,
And it flew.

I remember,
The cool spring Saturday we went
Outside, conspirators in flight,
Propeller wound to nearly snap,
Its wings held up to brush the morning air,
And it flew.

I remember
The soaring arc that climbed past age
Above the narrow city streets
And rushed headlong into a wind
That cut across an ever-widening sky,
And it flew.

I remember,
The ladder and broom that brushed it down
From shingles where it crashed midway
Along a path from man to boy
I watched tight-lipped while shouting loud inside,
It flew, oh Dad, it flew.