Nobody lies awake wishing for the roar of a plane, which is what makes the opening of Vlada Onica's "Planes" so surprising. The speaker lies in bed, listening to the night, and when a plane finally cuts through it she isn't annoyed. She has been waiting for it. A few sleepless nights without planes have left her restless, and she confesses, almost shyly, "I'll be honest, I missed them so much." From this small, tender admission the poem makes a leap. The plane that appears and then disappears over the horizon becomes a picture of the people who drift in and out of our lives.
The central idea is that closeness is fragile, and that we often measure it only once it has slipped away. The speaker says we "move on," we "forget they even were" in our lives, and then a single sight of them makes our "eyes start shining" and we "suddenly remember / How much you actually miss them." Memory here works like the sound of the plane: it is dormant until something sets it off. The poem doesn't end on blame, though. "They've got a life too," the speaker reminds us, and that line stops the poem from turning into a complaint. The plane isn't leaving because of her. It has somewhere to be, and so do people.
The poem is built in two halves, joined by the plain, almost offhand hinge "Then it kinda hit me / It's the same with people." The first half is concrete and sensory, made of cars, wind and engine noise. The second half is reflective and speaks in general terms. The poem is in free verse with no rhyme scheme, and its short lines read like someone thinking aloud at night. Its rhythm comes from interruption instead. "But then" appears again and again, once alone on its own line, like a held breath before the plane arrives. Each time it marks a change: the plane breaks the quiet, then moves on, then a person reappears, and then reality steps in with "But don't forget." The speaker's thoughts never settle, and that suits a poem about things that won't stay put.
The imagery is mostly sound, and it is more careful than it first looks. The night has a "silent song," a gentle oxymoron that suggests the speaker has learned to hear music in quiet. When the plane arrives it is "breaking the silence," yet the break is welcome, which is a paradox. The odd logic of the opening is that the absence of noise keeps her awake, so the sound she should dislike is the one that comforts her. The poem has already shown how missing something works before it applies the idea to people.
The vocabulary of movement runs through the whole piece: wind "passing by," the plane going "on its way," "disappearing," "move on," "vanish." Nothing in the poem stays still, and the same few words describe both machines and human beings. Against that runs the poem's one flash of light, the shining eyes. In a poem set almost entirely in the dark, that image makes seeing someone again feel like a lamp switching on.
The ending is the most telling choice. The people "vanish / Leaving you with a hole / And nostalgia." A hole is a physical image, an empty space where something used to be, much as the sky is empty after the plane has gone. "Nostalgia" is abstract and arrives last, almost as an afterthought, introduced by a quiet "And." There is no consoling final line. The poem trails off, and the feeling stays unresolved.
The comparison isn't perfect, and that may be to the poem's credit. The speaker misses the planes while they are gone, but with people she says we forget first and miss them only on sight. The plane teaches her something she hadn't admitted, that absence can be loud in its own way.
What makes "Planes" worth reading is that it starts from something ordinary, a noise overhead on a sleepless night, and lets it grow into a feeling most readers will recognize. It works because the speaker sounds honest and unpolished, as if she were speaking to herself.