Flying Garuda over Java
On the early morning flight
from Jakarta to Surabaya
secure a seat at a starboard window.
Edge out of the night
and contemplate one of nature’s
most sublime spectacles,
what Burke put in another dimension,
before the clouds throw themselves
together out of modesty
and constitute what Aldous Huxley
called ‘white islands’,
crags of volcanic condensation
(while trying to forget
Garuda’s record of aviation
disasters and hardware problems –
Garuda waking
in an enamelled pavilion
high in the branches of the world-tree –
Garuda the serpent-destroyer,
whose wings when flying
chant the Veda).
These are the twenty cones of Java.
They could be those of Io,
mooning around Jupiter –
and a little farther away
Bromo and Semeru
swimming in their violet haze.
All of them sacred sites
on the most densely populated
island in the world,
caldera demanding appeasement
from the anger-managers –
even volcanoes want to live on surplus.
*
And the file of tourists
trudging through the sand seas
round the Tengger crater
to Lava View Lodge
and the lakes of turquoise sulphur
have to register their impact:
lotus-swimming nymphs,
Buddha smiling in his rotunda,
all the pavilions of our civilised acts
have been built cheek-by-jowl
with the natural terrors
we mean to escape.
About this poem
This view from a plane over Java is far from being a plain view, and typical of Bamforth’s work in addressing philosophical concepts – Edmund Burke’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime – through vivid sensory impressions. Invoking the fear of flying alongside the mythical bird of Hindu and Buddhist texts, the everyday and the mythological are entwined throughout the poem. The last stanza has an extraordinary resonance.