CAT II

A Little Over a Hundred Years

It has been flying for a little over a hundred years.

In the beginning, it could not travel very far.
Its body was heavy, and the time it could remain in the sky was short.
People kept changing its body,
making it a little lighter, a little faster,
able to travel a little farther.

With time, it moved farther and farther away
from the place where it was born.

It heard languages it had never heard before
and carried faces it had never seen.

People packed their belongings into small bags and climbed aboard.
Some came back.
Some never did.

They carried clothes, food, and books.
They carried songs and ideas.
Sometimes they left them somewhere else before returning.

So many things passed through its body.

The landscape below kept changing too.

Cities grew larger, and nights became brighter.
People built things higher and higher
and learned how to fit more and more into smaller things.

What they called beautiful kept changing.
So did what they believed was right.

And yet, strangely,
some things kept returning.

On certain days, it could no longer cross the sky
it had crossed every day.

Borders closed.
Lights disappeared.
Black smoke rose in the distance.

People sometimes destroyed in a very short time
what had taken them years to build.

When it was over,
they began building again.

They raised things so they could remember.
They said they would not forget.

It has seen this many times.

And when enough time passes,
there is always another part of the sky
that can no longer be crossed.

Each time, it changes direction.

There are no roads visible in the sky,
but it has routes it travels every day.

A place that could be reached yesterday
has to be flown around today.

It no longer finds this strange.

After flying for a little over a hundred years,
one gets used to roads disappearing
and appearing again.

People keep moving.

Objects, languages, music, and ideas
move with them.

It carries them
and rises into the sky again.

Below, something is being built.

And somewhere else,
something already built
is disappearing.

It keeps flying.