Home > Poetry Magazine > Flight to Limbo

Poetry Magazine

POEM
RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry.

Flight to Limbo

By John Updike 1932–2009 John Updike

(At What Used to Be Called Idlewild)

The line didn’t move, though there were not

many people in it. In a half-hearted light

the lone agent dealt patiently, noiselessly, endlessly

with a large dazed family ranging

from twin toddlers in strollers to an old lady

in a bent wheelchair. Their baggage

was all in cardboard boxes. The plane was delayed,

the rumor went through the line. We shrugged,

in our hopeless overcoats. Aviation

had never seemed a very natural idea.

Bored children floated with faces drained of blood.

The girls in the tax-free shops stood frozen

amid promises of a beautiful life abroad.

Louis Armstrong sang in some upper corner,

a trickle of ignored joy.

Outside, in an unintelligible darkness

that stretched to include the rubies of strip malls,

winged behemoths prowled looking for the gates

where they could bury their koala-bear noses

and suck our dimming dynamos dry.

Boys in floppy sweatshirts and backward hats

slapped their feet ostentatiously

while security attendants giggled

and the voice of a misplaced angel melodiously

parroted FAA regulations. Women in saris

and kimonos dragged, as their penance, behind them

toddlers clutching Occidental teddy bears,

and chair legs screeched in the food court

while ill-paid wraiths mopped circles of night

into the motionless floor.

John Updike, “Flight to Limbo” from Americana and Other Poems. Copyright © 2001 by John Updike. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Source: Poetry (January 1997).

Biography

An acclaimed and award-winning writer of fiction, essays, and reviews, John Updike has also been writing poetry for most of his life. Growing up in Pennsylvania, his early inspiration to be a writer came from watching his mother, an aspiring writer, submit her work to magazines. In an interview Updike stated, “I began as a writer of light verse, and have tried to carry over into my serious or lyric verse something of the . . .

Continue reading this biography