In the late Eighties, poet David Antin had the beautiful idea to put some poems in the sky via skywriting planes. His Sky Poems were originally intended as a new form of epic poetry, both monumental and ephemeral, to be written in installments in locations all across the United States over the span of a decade. Only two poems have actually made it up so far, in Santa Monica and La Jolla, California. The form is constrained by the writing capacity of the planes (18-23 letters per line) and the cost, $650 per line. It is also limited by the viewer’s capacity to remember what has been written—the beginning of the line vanishes as the end of it is being written. The following poems were written in response to the question I posed to our class after we read about David Antin’s project: what would you write in the sky if you could?
—Jen Bervin

                     DREAMING SOMEDAY YOU
                     WILL BREATHE ME IN
                     AND CALL ME HOME

                     By Edmond H. Lee



                     Where: Coney Island
                     When: a cloudless, still summer day

                     IF WE ARE THIS CLOSE
                     YET SO FAR SEPARATED
                     CAN WE EVER BE AS ONE?

                     By Robert Ricca

                     IF LOVE IS CLOSE
                     THESE WORDS PAINT
                     YOUR JOY SKY-WIDE

                     By Marc Weissman