Another poem

Here's another selection from my poetry kick. I resonate with this one a lot because I have traveled so much. There is a unique disconnected-yet-holding-tightly-to-connections feeling that occurs for me when I travel, and this poem seems to capture it.

Night Flight
by Mary Oliver

Traveling at thirty thousand feet, we see
How much of earth still lies in wilderness,
Till terminals occur like miracles
To civilize the paralyzing dark.

Buckled for landing to a tilting chair,
I think: if miracle or accident
Should send us on across the upper air,
How many miles, or nights, or years to go
Before the mind, with its huge ego paling,
Before the heart, all expectations spent,
Should read the meaning of the scene below?

But now already the loved ones gather
Under the dome of welcome, as we glide
Over the final jutting mountainside,
Across the suburbs strangled in their lights,

And settled softly on the earth once more
Rise in the fierce assumption of our lives--
Discarding smoothly, as we disembark,
All thoughts that held us wiser for a moment
Up there alone, in the impartial dark.