Poems About Icarus

Southern Icarus by Michael R. Burch Windborne, lover of heights, unspooled from the truck’s wildly lurching embrace, you climb, skittish kite... What do you know of the world’s despair, gliding in vast solitariness there, so that all that remains is to fall? Only a little longer the wind invests its sighs; you stall, spread-eagled, as the canvas snaps and flaps its white rebellious wings, and all the houses watch with baffled eyes. Flight 93 by Michael R. Burch I held the switch in trembling fingers, asked why existence felt so small, so purposeless, like a minnow wriggling feebly in my grasp... vibrations of huge engines thrummed my arms as, glistening with sweat, I nudged the switch to OFF...I heard the klaxon's shrill alarms like vultures’ shriekings...earthward, in a stall... we floated...earthward...wings outstretched, aghast like Icarus...as through the void we fell... till nothing was so beautiful, so blue... so vivid as that moment...and I held an image of your face, and dreamed I flew into your arms. The earth rushed up. I knew such comfort, in that moment, loving you. I AM! by Michael R. Burch I am not one of ten billion?I? sunblackened Icarus, chary fly, staring at God with a quizzical eye. I am not one of ten billion, I. I am not one life has left unsquashed? scarred as Ulysses, goddess-debauched, pale glowworm agleam with a tale of panache. I am not one life has left unsquashed. I am not one without spots of disease, laugh lines and tan lines and thick-callused knees from begging and praying and girls sighing "Please!" I am not one without spots of disease. I am not one of ten billion?I? scion of Daedalus, blackwinged fly staring at God with a sedulous eye. I am not one of ten billion, I AM! Finally to Burn (the Fall and Resurrection of Icarus) by Michael R. Burch Athena takes me sometimes by the hand and we go levitating through strange Dreamlands where Apollo sleeps in his dark forgetting and Passion seems like a wise bloodletting and all I remember ,upon awaking, is: to Love sometimes is like forsaking one’s Being?to glide heroically beyond thought, forsaking the here for the There and the Not. O, finally to Burn, gravity beyond escaping! To plummet is Bliss when the blisters breaking rain down red scabs on the earth’s mudpuddle... Feathers and wax and the watchers huddle... Flocculent sheep, O, and innocent lambs!, I will rock me to sleep on the waves’ iambs. Free Fall by Michael R. Burch I have no earthly remembrance of you, as if we were never of earth, but merely white clouds adrift, swirling together through Himalayan serene altitudes? no more man and woman than exhaled breath?unable to fall back to solid existence, despite the air’s sparseness: all our being borne up, because of our lightness, toward the sun’s unendurable brightness... But since I touched you, fire consumes each wing! We who are unable to fly, stall contemplating disaster. Despair like an anchor, like an iron ball, heavier than ballast, sinks on its thick-looped chain toward the earth, and soon thereafter there will be sufficient pain to recall existence, to make the coming darkness everlasting. Fledglings by Michael R. Burch With her small eyes, pale and unforgiving, she taught me?December is not for those unweaned of love, the chirping nestlings who bicker for worms with dramatic throats still pinkly exposed, who have not yet learned the first harsh lesson of survival: to devour their weaker siblings in the high-leafed ferned fortress and impregnable bower from which men must fly like improbable dreams to become poets. They have yet to learn that, before they can soar starward, like fanciful archaic machines, they must first assimilate the latest technology, or lose all in the sudden realization of gravity, following Icarus’s, sun-unwinged, singed trajectory. The Higher Atmospheres by Michael R. Burch Whatever we became climbed on the thought of Love itself; we floated on plumed wings ten thousand miles above the breasted earth that had vexed us to such Distance; now all things seem small and pale, a girdle’s handsbreadth girth... I break upon the rocks; I break; I fling my human form about; I writhe; I writhe. Invention is not Mastery, nor wings Salvation. Here the Vulture cruelly chides and plunges at my eyes, and coos and sings... Oh, some will call the sun my doom, but Love melts callow wax the higher atmospheres leave brittle. I flew high: not high enough to melt such frozen resins...thus, Her jeers. Icarus Bickerous by Michael R. Burch for the Religious Right Like Icarus, waxen wings melting, white tail-feathers fall, bystanders pelting. They look up amazed and seem rather dazed? was it heaven’s or hell’s furious smelting that fashioned such vulturish wings? And why are they singed?? the higher you “rise,” the more halting? Earthbound by Michael R. Burch Earthbound, and yet I now fly through the clouds that are aimlessly drifting: so high that no sound echoing by below where the mountains are lifting the sky can be heard. Like a bird, but not meek, like a hawk from a distance regarding its prey, I will shriek, not a word, but a screech, and my terrible clamor will turn them to clay? the sheep, the earthbound. Flight by Michael R. Burch It is the nature of loveliness to vanish as butterfly wings, batting against nothingness seek transcendence... Sioux Vision Quest by Crazy Horse translation by Michael R. Burch A man must pursue his Vision as the eagle explores the sky's deepest blues. Flying by Michael R. Burch   I shall rise and try the bloody wings of thought ten thousand times before I fly   and then I'll sleep and waste ten thousand nights before I dream; but when at last   I soar the distant heights of undreamt skies where never hawks nor eagles dared to go, as I laugh among the meteors flashing by somewhere beyond the bluest earth-bound seas   if I'm not told I’m just a man, then I shall know just what I am.