Phantom Airships, after the fact

Recently, a commenter at UFO Conjectures felt the need to share with me a link concerning mystery aircraft, from 1865-1946. I was a little taken aback, as I’ve been well-apprised of this history since beginning my work on Orthoteny in the early 1990s.

The 1994 chapbook On the Phantom Air Ship Mystery cuts about the same swath, focusing on the Phantom Airships of 1896/7, then jumping ahead to the years just before the Great War, ending with the first bombing of London by Zeppelins and the story of Hill 60, before punctuating the section with the first modern sighting, Kenneth Arnold’s, in 1947.

I therefore share today the final three poems from the Phantom Airship sequence proper.

 

1913

 

The luminous object witnessed early last evening

The War Office has declared a spy-craft

 

Tonight a piercing light

                lit up every corner

                                swept up to the hills

Bright lights flew over at thirty miles an hour

                huffing like a faint train

                                the squeal of gears a clank of flaps

 

Rising last evening

                all of magnitudes greater

                                than Venus

Before daybreak

                unidentifiable lights

                                crossed the Channel

Seen overhead

                sixty miles further

                                every hour after

All afternoon

                they cruised west in threes

                                streets crowded to see

With sunset

                one’s lamp played down

                                gone in a flash

From the east

                three came

                                to hover an hour

Silhouetted

                in their own

                                dazzling glare

 

 

Zeppelin

 

The tram stops

Blackout

A distant drone

 

The audience rises

To sing

“God Save the King”

 

One incendiary

Crashed through the ceiling

Went off in the hall

 

They were in bed and old

Knelt by the bed

And held each other

 

Another fell between the roofs

Onto the narrow lane just in front of them

But bounced off before it burst

 

The side of one house

And the Salvation Army Barracks windows

Blown out

 

A boarding house burned down

The Butcher’s shutters rattled

Neighbours in sheets on the street

 

Three of them lit up against the sky

Incendiaries fireballs falling

Searchlights and the city burning making a twilight

 

 

Hill Sixty

 

Dawn broke clear over Sulva Bay

Only six oval silvery clouds loafed

Undisturbed by the breeze

 

At sixty degrees

To us twenty-four

Six hundred feet away

 

Over the Hill a gunmetal cloud

Three hundred feet high and wide nine hundred long

Not nineteen chains from the trenches

 

The First

Fourth Norfolk

Ordered to reinforce the Hill

 

Were lost to sight as they marched

Into the cloud

For almost an hour

 

It rose then

Off with the others

North

 

No trace

Or record of them

Every found