Verse:
Schwartz, Hillel
Hillel Schwartz Why After All Octave Chanute Encouraged the Two Brothers So Flight began with the end of Fall & a City-of-gold. December: Orville a hundred feet up Kill Devil Hill & twelve...
...I'm not hysterical...
...And now some seven miles up half across the Atlantic, I shall lay me down to sleep...
...December: Orville a hundred feet up Kill Devil Hill & twelve seconds later down by Will...
...The two men yell and fly again against the shrill of Kitty Hawk wind, but it's all God's doing, isn't it...
...If it was not parable in 1903, if names were not milled to fit the lesson, straight as maple off the saw, then whence these men of Middle West come flying off Kill Devil Hill at the leap of the century...
...Mother mathematical, father inspired, sons with skill and faith...
...If the good Lord had not meant us all to fly, he'd never have named that hill Kill Devil or that family Wright or Orville Orville or Wilbur Will...
...Orville's thirty-two, precisely the pull of the earth, & responsible for the ailerons...
...from Ohio chill to Atlantic swell, they were called to fly...
...This their father tells Will, Beloved-stronghold, who by sunfall has flown to beat the devil nearly a minute...
...It's better somehow than bicycles, better than dull balloons...
...Will's older, once a printer, still public...
...or Orville Orville or Wilbur Will...
...Hell, it was foreordained: from wind tunnel to sandspit...
...the evil burn up...
...They are both single, neither smokes nor chews nor swills...
...Only the good can fly...
...The evangelical United Brethren & their episcopal father: to fly you first must kneel then lie until at last you feel the lift...
Vol. 110 • June 1983 • No. 11
