Gary Lehmann Receives Second Pushcart Nomination

October 1

Gary Lehmann was nominated by the editors of the Skyline Literary Community for the Pushcart Prize. The poem, "First in Flight" appeared last summer in Skyline Magazine. It has since appeared in Big Pond Rumors in Canada and was reprinted by Skyline in October. It is scheduled to appear in Literary House Review in October 2007.

First in Flight

by
Gary Lehmann

Castle Green had a festival atmosphere as 25,000 to 30,000
people gathered to see a young aeronaut risk his life in a hot air balloon.
Manhattan had been deemed too windy and wet previously.

At the center of this hub-bub, a giant cotton balloon was being inflated
by maneuvering alternate fire pots close to its cavernous mouth.
As the heat accumulated, the bag began to rise, slump on its side, then stand.

People were amazed as the giant began to move like a sleeping beast.
A well-dressed youth handed out broadsides containing a poem
about the joys of flight penned by one Charles Ferson Durant.

It was this same youth, styling himself also an inventor and astronomer,
who climbed confidently into the wicker basket attached precariously
to the rising balloon by a multitude of thin lines of braided twine.

Bags of sand were dropped and the unstable contraption
arose with many bumps and shudders from the Battery Green.
It headed out over New York harbor in a generally westerly direction.

Ferry boat passengers crowded the rails cheering and holding
their hats and parasols to shade their eyes from the sunny sky.
Thursday, September 9, 1830 something extraordinary happened.

A man rose off the ground, the first in North America, waving his
beaver hat and dropping the rest of his poetry onto the multitudes below
as he sedately drifted toward the Hudson’s west bank -- and beyond.