Electric Aviation

A NaPoWriMo Poem for Day 14 bridging poetry and technological advances

Today’s NaPoWriMo prompt invites a poem bridging technological advance and the ancient territories poetry has always claimed as its own — love, nature, the shape of a life.

And now for our (optional!) prompt. Poetry is an ancient art, and one that revisits themes that existed thousands of years ago – love, nature, jealousy. But that doesn’t mean that poets live in a sort of pre-history unaffected by technological advances. Emily Dickinson wrote about trains, and I’m rather charmed by this 1981 poem about the “incredible hair” of actors on television. In a more recent example, Becca Klaver’s “Manifesto of the Lyric Selfie” draws inspiration from the contemporary drive to document everything in digital photographs. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that similarly bridges (whether smoothly or not) the seeming divide between poetry and technological advances.

The maritime facts hold firmly — yet the claim needs tightening. Norway mandates zero-emission vessels in World Heritage fjords from 2026, and banned heavy fuel oil around Svalbard already. The hybrid framing understates it. On the aviation side, Heart Aerospace comes from Sweden, and Scandinavia leads regionally — yet the specific claim that Norway “positions itself to bring electric regional routes into service before anyone else seriously considers the runway” overstates what the evidence currently supports. Here’s a corrected version:

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When I read the prompt I remembered a note from Dr. Bronce Rice about noise pollution. From there my mind travelled to Eyjafjallajökull — the volcano whose unpronounceable name shut European airspace for six days in April 2010 — and the extraordinary silence settling over the continent while it did.

I know electric vehicles, ships, trains, buses. So I asked myself: what about electric passenger aviation?

The noise reduction alone seemed worth the thought. And it turns out the question arrives later than I imagined — regional electric aircraft already fly, certifications progress, and Scandinavia moves first as it so often does on clean energy. Norway already mandates zero-emission vessels in its World Heritage fjords from this year, and banned heavy fuel oil around Svalbard entirely. Sweden’s Heart Aerospace draws firm orders from Finnair and United alike. The regional air routes connecting these countries make short-hop electric aviation the most logical next step.

So I spent the morning inside all of that — solar panels drinking unfiltered light above the cloud line, albatrosses banking wind gradients for free propulsion, the physics of regenerative descent, the geopolitics of a closed strait making every energy-importing nation suddenly recalculate its dependence.

Somewhere in all of that the technology dissolved into something older. Impermanence. Relation. The cost of the closed fist versus the open hand.

The poem arrived from there.

Electric Flight

I step into a cabin where silence carries weight and motion hums through stored light,
a wing gathers sun above the cloud line and feeds a steady current into the body of flight,
air flows along the surface and offers lift as the craft aligns with what already moves.

I sense a different logic at work.

Energy arrives through relation,
direction forms through adjustment,
travel unfolds through exchange with field and flow.

I feel my own patterns respond.

I release fixed edges and let meaning form through contact,
I meet rather than measure and allow each moment to shape the next,
I follow movement as it reorganizes thought and opens space for response.

The aircraft holds its course through continuous tuning,
it listens to current, to pressure, to subtle shifts across its skin,
it arrives through coherence rather than force.

I recognize the same motion in myself.

Life carries me further when I join what moves
and let relation write the path forward.

As always, Thank you for reading and following.

xo Jay

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