The Midnight Plane

His wife was due on the midnight plane

That was coming from Beijing,

He got to the airport early so

He wouldn’t miss the thing,

There wasn’t a seat at Wenzhou so

He found that he had to stand,

It’s always tough when you’re sleeping rough

Away, in a foreign land.

 

He settled down in a corner, set

His back up next to the wall,

Pulled out the pic of his own Mei Ling

In front of a waterfall,

Her eyes smiled into the camera when

He’d taken the snap that day,

But that was before they married,

Now it seemed an age away.

 

They’d both had to fight her parents when

They saw he was from the west,

They called him a foreign devil, a

Yang wei, and all the rest,

They wanted her wed to a Han, they said,

Mei Ling had answered ‘No!’

She’d made her mind up herself, she said,

And would be his own lao pό.

 

She said she was flying China Air

And that gave him cause for thought,

He knew that their safety record was

The worst in any port,

But he waited patiently by the clock

Til it gave the midnight chime,

Then wandered into reception where

She’d be, most any time.

 

The Chinese waiting beside him

Milled and jabbered as they stood,

He never could understand a word

But he smiled as if he could,

And then he found they were friendly

Though they nudged each other now,

And some had even approached him with

Their greeting, their Ni Hao.

 

By half past twelve, there wasn’t a plane

And the people looked upset,

He thought there’d be an announcement,

Someone said, ‘there’s nothing yet.’

At one o’clock there were tears and fears

That the plane would never show,

And then he heard that the plane had ditched

In the waters off Ningbo.

 

His heart had sunk and he almost cried

But he thought to grieve with grace,

And everyone else was struggling

They were scared of ‘losing face’,

But they all broke down when a man came round

And he said, ‘there’s little hope,’

There wasn’t a single survivor,

Then he cried, he couldn’t cope.

 

He’d lost the love of his life, Mei Ling

With her beaming almond eyes,

Her jet black hair and her loving stare

But he got a quick surprise,

A man led him to a phone where they

Had called for him in vain,

And from Beijing he heard Mei Ling

Who sobbed, ‘I missed the plane!’

 

David Lewis Paget

Reviews

[Marie]

David you are getting soft. In you last poem "The Temptation," instead of killing his wife and her lover, the man simply leaves for a friendlier place. And in this one, instead of seeing the apparition of a dripping corpse, he gets a call saying she's all right.

Where are the groaning ghosts and ghastly ghouls...?

[Bright Ocean Star]

Oh, David...this is so good! It is timely, considering the Boeing 777 that disappeared last year and then this newest crash. You've written a beautiful, sensitive, lovely piece. Thank you.