There’s a hollow in the morning sky, split wide by jet engines and time zones,
Where prayers stitched by mothers unravel at thirty-one thousand feet,
above the static and drone,
A June sunrise catches the silver hull, gleaming
like a wish carried west across the curve of the Earth,
Not a soul on board suspects they’ll be scattered as salt in ocean birth—
Babies dreaming in their bassinets,
grandparents leafing through tattered passports and last goodbyes,
All of them trusting in the physics of flight,
never imagining death sewn into their luggage as a prize.
Somewhere beneath the humming wings,
a suitcase ticks in perfect time with a fanatic’s heart,
A bomb engineered in shadows,
slipped past scanners by men who pray and plot worlds apart,
The flight attendant smooths blankets, the captain checks gauges and weather,
Nobody reads the omens hiding in the clouds —
nobody expects families to vanish together,
They never teach you, when you buy a ticket,
how quickly love and lineage can dissolve in the sky,
How an ideology, sharp as shrapnel,
turns the living into memories too empty to cry.
In Cork, in Montreal, in Mumbai,
the phones will ring and ring with no answer but static,
Kids missing from breakfast, fathers reduced to sea-foam,
mothers’ voices forever frantic,
An ocean isn’t a grave—no, it’s a thief, swallowing last words and gold bangles,
Turbans and teddy bears, diaries scrawled in panic, all tangled
With the debris field, a map of grief printed in latitude and longitude,
Forensics bagging hope in plastic, while politicians mumble platitudes.
Nobody will ever know the last thought crossing a mind as steel skin tears,
Maybe it’s the memory of sandalwood incense, or a child’s giggle, or the prayers
Sent up for safe landings and new beginnings —
scattered now like ashes across a continent’s sorrow,
A community cleaved, a hundred names carved on monuments nobody visits tomorrow,
Investigations drag for years, apologies come as cold comfort,
Justice delayed, diluted, shamed by the stink of paperwork and forgotten effort.
Families press saris to their faces, clinging to scent,
refusing the closure of sea-water and silence,
They gather every June,
lighting candles for ghosts that haunt the flight manifest in defiance,
You can’t bomb the memory out of blood,
can’t wipe away a generation’s DNA from the black box tape,
They’ll keep flying, but every journey is different
when you know how easily engines and trust can break,
In every airport lounge, you can still hear the hollow whistle of what was lost,
A lesson in how hate takes flight, and innocence is always the cost.
Ash over the ocean, prayers tangled in jet stream,
A hundred families dreaming, shredded midair—just a headline, just a scream,
The sea holds their secrets, but every sunrise stains the horizon red,
The innocent carried by flight and by faith, now numbers and names for the dead.
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