Speed

on Valentine’s Day in 1990
an airplane carrying 139 slammed
into the golf course in Bangalore city,
while attempting to land.

92 men, women, babies, children,
died of horrific injuries and burns.
TV footage showed a face my aunt
thought resembled her spouse.

dad and sister volunteered
to identify him at the morgue.
it wasn’t he; but my sister
described the scene endured.

mothers clutching babies,
broken bodies, head injuries,
entire families routed
in a flash of pilot error.

a few weeks later, as a form of catharsis
(and curiosity, if we’re being honest),
sister, myself, and close friends
visited the crash site in a jeep.

no more investigators or buzzing press,
the road behind was our access, as we
stood outside crisscrossed wire fence and
surveyed the wreckage.

the flying machine that once soared
was now halved and blackened;
fuselage, tail, wings, broken up and
spread across the golf green floor.

that absorbed, we set off for a
planned picnic lunch in the national park.
eschewing the visitors’ entrance,
we snuck in around the back.

undaunted by 7 foot high cordon, we
stepped on friends’ linked palms,
stood on shoulders, hoisted ourselves,
passed picnic stuff, and scaled that wall.

seven or eight of us crossed in ten minutes.
ten minutes more laying mats, food and drink
on a flat area beneath a wide tree.
then friends sat, cross legged, to begin,

but now closer to the ground
eyes traced giant pug marks in the earth.
horror on faces as it dawned:
picnic spot was lion enclosure.

it took less than a minute for us all
to ditch the picnic, with one thought,
and rocket ourselves over that wall.
a lesson on life, survival and death.