Flight Science & Technology Research Group
Wright Brothers Poem
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Kittyhawk, December 1903
A cup of carefully filtered gasoline
drove
their wings against the flat wind
that
made the Outer Banks a wreckers' coast.
Its
fumes dispersed across the dunes
before
the telegraph could report the flight
to
a curiously un-hearing world.
They'd
still fully to master the air,
–
just revealed the transparent fringe
storm-birds
flying ahead of a tempest.
The
brothers struck camp for Christmas
back
in Dayton Ohio, with the Bishop
the
sister and, at last, their grail.
Full
conquest took a few more years
chasing
the invisible around Huffman Prairie
learning
to control their Flyer.
Then
patent fights, manufacturing rights
refinement,
disclosure, military sales.
The tempest wrote long lines across the sky.
Courtesy of Noel Whittall October 2002