Are those your bones Amelia?
Humerus radius tibia

If they could speak what stories would they tell?
How you crawled through fire to save Fred Noonan?
How you were cast away like Robinson Crusoe?
Was Fred your man Friday?

About the sun, sharp and relentless, how it burned your skin, already charred?
About the rain that drenched your shelter, hastily built in the shade of a ren tree?

They say you lived for sixty-one days.
Did you live or just survive?
Were you sad or secretly relieved to be free of photographers’ flashing bulbs
and Lucky Strike?

Did Fred smoke as the plane plummeted,
cinders mixed with the flaming wreckage?

Benedictine, a shoe, and freckle cream,
remnants of a life cut short.
Called to tell the tale, they will testify to your courage.

The island holds the secrets of your fate.
Like Electra, will you have your revenge
or return to the sky in a play of light?

Goddess of the skies,
Icarus redeemed,
your flame still burns bright
when young girls dream of flight.

– Jennifer Gauthier

Author’s Note: “Poem for Amelia” was one of the first poems I wrote in the cycle about remarkable women in history. I had read an article in National Geographic about the numerous expeditions to find evidence of her crash and death. I started thinking about our fascination with her as a pioneering woman, and yet when I did some research about her life, I realized that I actually knew very little. The mystery and tragedy of her life and death inspired the poem.