Mh 370 Poem by Biswajit Basu

Night set in and Kuala Lumpur airport is awash with light,
Milling passengers hurry rushing through the checks,
Some with phones glued to ears, some with eyes brimming tears,
Bidding farewell one last time; heart heavy with unknown fears.


On that fateful night was a routine flight,
MH 370 direct from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing,
239 souls packed in a cylindrical steel tube,
Took off at forty one minutes past midnight.
As the plane turned slightly east of north,
The settling passengers could dimly see,
The quarter moon glowing eerily off the twin Petronas Towers.
As the plane flew into the velvety night.
Captain Zahrie Ahmed Shah settled into his seat,
As his great bird ascended into the sky,
His co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid,
Smiled as he watched the lights of KL pass by.
So they flew routinely on this northeasterly path,
And over the South China Sea,
And forty minutes into the black night.
The Malay air control signed off for this flight.
All was well, the instruments said, the engines reassuringly humming,
As Hamid read out the instruments all was well as he could see,
And Shah uttered his last words that in our ears will forever ring,
Signing off to Malaysian air control, “All right, good night” said he.


Soon the pilots noticed a strange smell on the flight-deck,
Were they electrical fumes or from burning rubber?
Shah scanned all his instruments but yet there was no sign.
Of anything being even slightly amiss.
But searching whence emanated this smell so foul,
To Vietnam air control they delayed their arrival to wire.
However, unknown then to both of them,
The tyre of the plane’s nosewheel was on fire,
And retracting after take off, it had set ablaze its pod,
Throwing the fate of 239 souls to the hands of God.
As the smell increased, smoke started to billow,
And the pilots somehow felt it was an electrical fire,
So they began an effort to isolate the burning wire,
In doing so, they shut off the radar transponders as well,
So off from the screens all commercial radars they fell.
The truth then flashed through Shah's mind and he told Hamid so,
The front tire had overheated during takeoff and was ablaze,
And as they wondered, relentlessly the smoke continued to grow.


It was time for a decision and Shah saw it fit to divert,
With a damaged nosewheel he knew he needed a long runway,
This was at Langkawi and so he turned leftward to the east.
Meanwhile the smoke in the cockpit grew stiflingly worse,
And Shah then announced an emergency to all on board,
And to stop the fire he decided to deprive it of oxygen to breathe,
He ascended very high into the sky – higher and higher went he,
Till the air was so thin it could support the plane no more,
And so it became like a dead stone in the sky,
And trailing smoke all the way the great bird tumblingly fell.
Halfway to the ground, the heroic pilot, perspiring profusely now,
In a desperate effort, pulled out of the deathly dive.
The smoke was overpowering and co-pilot Hamid,
Fell unconscious and was unable to help.
Captain Shah took the only chance to land that was good,
He turned the great airliner left again to a southerly course,
To touch down in anywhere that he possibly could,
Still trembling from that awful dive, his mind slowly drifted away,
Where and when, he asked himself had he let things go wrong,
Consciousness passed away from him through his wide open eyes.
Captain Zahrie Shah died on his seat, co-pilot Hamid had already gone.


Meanwhile the deadly smoke asphyxiated the passengers and crew.
As the great bird flew relentlessly on - all reason drowned,
Aimless and unheeding, flying as a great steel coffin of death,
All the passengers and crew were now to heaven bound.
And on and on it flew by itself on a southerly tack,
Finally with only dead souls the plane began to descend,
Consuming all its fuel as it inevitably would,
It had now reached its last gasping end.
The great jet engines faltering finally to die,
As this ghostly airplane took its final nose dive,
It plunged into the cold and stormy seas.
West of Australia on the Indian Ocean’s southern side,
Where a sea-storm raged, liquid mountains of ocean rolled,
The wind screamed like an enraged banshee,
And angry white streaks of foam whipped off the wave crests,
As the great airliner plunged violently into the sea.
Below the tumult on the surface, in a seeming slow motion of calm,
As the sightless 239 souls and the remnants of the great MH 370
Shattered to pieces battered by the sea’s hammer blows,
And sank forever into the dark abyss of the bottomless sea.