My Poetry: Notes on a Destiny, Ignored (The Fall of Icarus by Breughel)

In tired arms, a grandson rests

In the crook of a widow's embrace

Grief dressed like shadows

Turn the black room silent.


But outside that hushed room,

Which mists with tales studded

With joy and heartache,

Men laugh, 

Because they do not know,

A child is born, dumb to its fate,

The world moves a mile through space,

History keeps repeating,

Clones keep collecting pennies

From a dry well to buy false wishes, 

Too many too busy to look up.

And so nobody noticed the boy

Fall from the crystal blue sky,

Or see the ship which witnessed

History but still set sail for the horizon

To fulfill its destiny anyway;

Nobody saw the boy’s feathers

Melt from his thin white arms

Just before he fell;

Were you talking to the ploughman

About reaping what you'd sowed?

Were you blinded by your own 

Little history unfolding

And miss poor Icarus, the fool,

Reaching for the sun?

His death made mourners

Of rubberneckers

For a second a nation recoiled

Then returned to cups of tea and biscuits

Forgetting the death,

Because it did not belong to them.

I wrote this after watching a programme discussing Breughel’s Icarus painting (below) and reading W. H. Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts(1940)

http://poetrypages.lemon8.nl/life/mu...ebeauxarts.htm

Further reading: 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus' by William Carlos Williams http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/l...pe-fall-icarus

Lines on Brueghel’s “Icarus” by Michael Hamburger http://timesflowstemmed.com/2014/06/...eghels-icarus/