"High Flight"

by Dru Blair

24in x 30in Open Edition Signed Print

A lone F-16 drifts upward, leaving in it’s wake, a footprint of swirls to mark its passage through a magnificent ocean of clouds. Inspired by American pilot John Gillespie Magee, Jr.’s poem, written to his parents 2 months before he perished in his Spitfire over Britain.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward Ive climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hovring there,
Ive chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
Ive topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind Ive trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
- John Gillespie Magee, Jr