For everyone, freefall must be a poetic experience. Just as, for their
perspectives, a teacher and then a poet will be sent on the Space Shuttle, so
too should we try to see the poetry of freefall is written. A poet might capture
that eternal moment in a net of words, and give it to us forever.
I am not a poet, but I know that there is nothing like whipping through the
air at incredible speed towards diminutive fields and farms only a ripcord
from oblivion, knifing through a volume of air that is live and sentient and
muttering low like thwarted death, a vast, vast force that merely tolerates our
trifling, and perhaps may be biding its time. Whether it is tame or treacherous
I am not yet able to tell. But I know that it is huge.
There is a life-force there in freefall, a life-force that
augments and intensifies our own. We will never live more
vividly. Someone should write our poetry, even if it is enough to us that we
live it for moments at a time.