The Sunday Poem: Amelia on Nikumaroro

Today, news broke of yet more clues in the ongoing search for Amelia Earhart’s final resting place. It’s a fascinating story, of course, with red herrings and silly conspiracy theories and bad movies made. And it prompts a poem cobbled from Wikipedia references and article tidbits.

“This is Amelia Earhart. Ship is on a reef south of the equator.”
–heard by Dana Randolph of Rock Springs, Wyoming, via shortwave radio

Itasca, Itasca, why won’t you come in?
Two days, Noonan sick, and now the plane’s a-tilt,
The engine dipping wet to the lagoon.
Soon the salty sea will get in, and then
The radio charge will sink, disconnecting, and silt
Will swallow this Electra, our signal’s tomb.

When I was little Meeley, the girl in brown,
I read my books and walked alone, and swore
To be myself, not just a skirt and pretty eyes.
But I still doled out medicines to men struck down
Before the Armistice, in Toronto during the War.
And now I tend the ill again, in paradise.

It’s hard to escape. A life spent moving now at rest
On the 157/337 line, adrift
A thousand miles from my own place and time.
A chance to be myself, for some years at least.
To camp, crack clams, light fires, desperately sift
Through sandy logbooks for hints of where I went awry.

I can’t help but think my lovely red Vega
Would have held me up, buffeted by wind and sun,
Wings cupped like hands, beseeching.
Instead, I had to reach for a new plane, the way
I always have since I asked Anita Snook in ‘21
“I want to fly. Will you teach me?”

If you can hear me, this is A.E. on a reef,
South of the equator. Noonan’s fading, I am forsook,
With no place to dig a grave. I stand on coral,
A yards-wide strand planes buzz but do not see.
I have lived my life reaching for the history books.
I will not stand my life to have a death with no moral.

Itasca, why won’t you come in?
Was my final flight into the sun?