Taking Flight [Major Revision-New Title]

[Achebe]

I am quite impressed. The revision is infinitely superior to the original. It's actually a pretty good poem now.
Some comments below again:

Taking flight

In sundown Australia,
seen below, the plane is
a southern cross 
searching for a northern sky,
flashing signals
as it passes along:
red-white--red-white;
all corners of the 'craft --
and sometimes
the plane flashes
red-white-and-blue. ...nice

Here, in long awaited sun rise, 
at the airport
where I nearly slept,
I'm now watchful to the east
for travel, and for 
opportunities where 
I may go beyond ...crossed out...too much prefacing
the Indian Ocean
to and the mighty Pacific seas. ...only issue for me here is geography....there is no flight that'll take you over the Indian Ocean and the Pacific....so might remove the former?
watchful
to travel for something,
painful
the long haul, BUT ...not sure why you had the italicised words...they didn't add anything to the poem for me.
to leave and arrive
on the very same day. 

When the sun sets
and I must go,
two days left behind
to international lines.
Across barren blue waste; ...an ocean is hardly barren, except in the minds of bad 18th century poets. sounds very copied and amateurish.
oceans double their size
perspective-wise 
on the way home. ...love this one. flying back home, you lose a day and it seems like it's taken double the time. also. smart.




------------Original--------------

Phases 

Lifestyle of day/night phases:
watchful to the east
until our sun sets
when I look to the west.
 
The plane to New York
follows east.
By the end of twenty-two hours,
I will have lost nothing,
not even a day.
 
When the plane travels
west again, I'll wonder where
two days have been.
 
A verse for starlight gazes.
Stars that I know
down south, where I live,
will reverse in New York
and return again here.
A watchful eye
to Orion's sky;
the only thing I'll recognise.
 
And now,
like clockwork,
through time-zones I go:
I'll follow planes east,
and where the planes stop,
I'll follow east further
and wind back at home.