Poet’s Corner: Western Maine Overflight

Editor’s note: With the discussion of proposed changes of low flight jet training over western Maine, here is Poet Henry Braun’s take off from Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing” of 100 years ago:

Channel Firing
(in a redacted version called “Western Maine Overflight”)

That night your loud planes, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, “No;
It’s 500′ over western Maine
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

“All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

“That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening ….

“Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).”

So down we lay again. “I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,”
Said one, “than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!”

And many a skeleton shook his head.
“Instead of preaching forty year,”
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
“I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.”

Again the planes disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to raise hell
As far inland as Farmington
And Weld, and starlit Bethel.

Thomas Hardy (& Henry Braun)

For relief, here’s Hardy’s magnificent last stanza. In its original,
the grand perspective:

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge
As far inland as Stourton Tower
And Camelot and starlit Stonehenge.