Boarding a plane is one of the most ordinary things a person can do today, yet Luca Flauto's "XXII - Flying Away" turns it into a small act of courage with a sting in its tail. The speaker is flying again "after years of stubbornness and fear," and the poem follows that return through three moods: pride, envy, and finally an uneasy honesty about what the journey is for. Its central idea is that technology can carry us across any distance but cannot repair what time has done to our relationships, and that adulthood means knowing the difference.
The opening already holds a quiet confession. Fear is expected, but "stubbornness" suggests the speaker kept themselves on the ground by choice, at least partly. "Away" and "again" pull in two directions: the first sounds like escape, the second like a return to something half-forgotten. The exclamation "What a feeling" is left unexplained, so the reader gets the thrill before learning what it is made of.
The second stanza turns to the other passengers. The "brave kids" board "completely / thoughtless," and the line break leaves "thoughtless" alone on its own line like a verdict. The compliment in "brave" is undercut at once: their courage is only a lack of information, since "They don't have idea / the struggle of the adult life." The missing small words make the sentence sound muttered rather than composed. The tone is slightly sour, the envy of someone who knows what everything costs. But the stanza also quietly reverses its own praise. If the children's bravery costs them nothing, the speaker's bravery, won back after years of fear, counts for more.
The refrain returns in the third stanza, and here the poem is at its lightest. "Being above the clouds / and watching them / instead of looking up" is a neat reversal of perspective. It recalls the way we first experience the sky as something overhead and out of reach, and now the speaker is on the other side of it. The plain, soft verbs "being" and "watching" give the lines a floating, weightless quality. "Watching" also echoes the second stanza, linking the speaker to the kids as another observer.
Then the poem darkens. The reason for the flight finally appears in the last stanza, held back by a line break after "meeting people who." These people "disappeared time ago." The verb is striking. Nobody moved away or lost touch; they disappeared, as if the relationships dissolved rather than ended. The poem never says why, and the missing "long" in "time ago" leaves the length of the absence vague, which makes it feel larger. The "mixture of anxiety / and adrenaline" shows why the opening feeling needed no name. The two words share a rhythm and an opening vowel sound, as though fear and excitement were the same bodily rush with different labels.
The ending is the poem's best move. The last sentence stretches over three lines, "time that not even an airplane / can change," and finishes without an exclamation mark. After two cries of "What a feeling," the voice settles into flat acceptance. The airplane, the symbol of conquered space, is set against the one thing it cannot conquer. Height and speed bought the speaker a reunion but not the lost years.
Formally the poem is free verse. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the short lines follow the pace of speech. The stanzas run three, five, four and six lines, widening overall as the feelings become more tangled. The language is plain, with a few phrases that read as non-standard English, and that plainness suits the subject. A more polished voice would make the speaker sound in control, and this one sounds like someone still working out what the trip means.
The poem matters because it takes a familiar scene, with its departure gate, children and clouds, and finds in it a modest, truthful insight. Overcoming a fear is not the same as undoing a loss. The Roman numeral in the title hints that this is one piece of a larger numbered sequence, but the poem stands well enough alone: it begins in triumph and ends in a quiet admission that some distances cannot be flown.