ManicDDaily

A New Yorker Thinking About Depictions of Icarus

The closest to Icarus
I’ve ever seen
was the second plane streaming
into the World Trade Center.

Though the plane
was not trying to ascend–
it was flying level, straight,
dead-on.

There was no wing flap, no halt
of collecting breath.
It seemed, in that great blue stare,
as if the plane expended
no effort at all–

until it made its own
fire ball, a gaseous fist
of orange sun blooming black,
and the street, which had like me
been watching dumbly,
screamed.

All that felt like wax
was time–it fixed us–me at Bleecker
and Sixth; to my side, a tall woman,
grey streaks in parted hair, face re-running
her partner’s schedule that downtown day–

When seeing the dark shapes that later spiraled
from the smoking windows,
some science high school kids, much closer to the scene,
thought  that they were desks being thrown out,
people trying, for some strange reason,
to save their work–

Smaller children, led away
from a nearby elementary,
looked up and saw
big birds.

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Here’s a drafty poem for Marina Sofia’s prompt on dVerse Poets Pub. Marina’s prompt is really to write of something seen from the corner of an eye, but she discusses, in a lovely way, Breughel’s painting, “The Fall of Icarus” and various poems about it; so this was what came up for me.

Process note–Icarus, the son of the great craftsman Daedelus, escaped from Minos’s palace in Crete with wax wings fashioned by his father.  Despite his father’s warnings, he flew too close to the sun, and the wax melted.  Of course, many people jumped from the WTC rather than be burned.

The above image is Rubens’ painting of Daedelus and Icarus–no copyright infringement intended. 

PS — sorry for the plug, but I’d be most grateful to anyone for checking out my new book, Nice–available on Amazon and in Kindle.