Tuesday, May 17, 2016

The Son of Daedalus


Feathers floated to
the dusty ground.
Stirred by the dry wind
into dizzying tornadoes
of failure.

An ever growing shadow
was cast on the ground,
expanding with each passing
second as the people took
notice of the deteriorating wings.

The people pointed and gasped
up at the sky as Icarus
tumbled and spun
toward his doom due to
his over-ambition.

Icarus flapped and fumbled,
trying to steady himself against
the buffeting winds of his fall,
scattering feathers through the
air.

The crowd stood in a horrified
stupor, watching the poor son
of Daedalus plummet helpless
to the spinning Earth and the
angry sea.

The giddy ambition of Icarus,
despite his father’s warnings,
to fly level and straight were ignored,
and Icarus tumbled from the
sky after soaring toward the sun.

Blind ambition, to do a thing
just because one can, isn’t often
reason enough to do it.
The sun can melt your wings
and you can fall to your death in the sea.  

I think that’s the lesson I learned
from the tale of Icarus as a child.
It’s tempered my ambition
and perhaps made me afraid of flying too
close to the sun.


By Jacob Peter Gowy - http://www.museodelprado.es/imagen/alta_resolucion/P01540_01.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27493281

No comments:

Post a Comment