Watch for the saucer
spinning over Roswell
on edge like a dime
in a magic trick
(now you see it now you don’t).
Tighten your seatbelt.
Close your eyes. You’re high
in your father’s rental plane—
one with silver wings
flashy as any
gaudy spaceship wreckage
in summer-bright fields
below, glitter row
after row of torn tinfoil
on tumbled red rock.
As hard as you try
you can’t forget how many
times you circled earth
and how you returned
in a blaze of amazement
from heaven to home.
—
Pamela Yenser once lived in Roswell, where her father, a retired Army pilot, flew her over the crash site of the “flying disc” associated with the so-called Roswell Flying Saucer Incident. Her family moved away in 1949, but she returned sixty years later to teach and write in Albuquerque.
200 New Mexico Poems 