Icarus <br />has had a bad press <br />throughout history <br />as some sort of moral metaphor <br />for a man who challenged <br />Intelligent Design <br />and/or the gods <br />and failed, in a narrow-minded view <br /> <br />A young man’s ambition <br />and perhaps devotion <br />drew him towards the heavens <br />why not <br />and science had not developed very far <br />so how was he to know <br />except by experiment <br /> <br />I’d like to think that as he dropped <br />out of a cloudless Greek sky <br />out of mythology <br />out of Breughel’s painting <br />out of Auden’s mindfulness <br /> <br />he was caught before the third and last bobbing up <br />by a bevy of compassionate mermaids <br />and returned gently to land <br />to live again perhaps under <br />an assumed name <br /> <br />while the mermaids sang to each other his story <br />across the seven seas <br />who whispered it to men <br />in the off-shore breeze <br />as a moral story telling how <br /> <br />heartfelt prayer always reaches heaven <br />there to be taken into account <br />but science is dodgy, make sure <br />you get it right and <br />it will be your servant <br /> <br />and when one day with heaven’s consent <br />you build a better vehicle to ‘conquer’ space <br />though how untrue a phrase <br />perhaps Apollo would be <br />a safer name since Icarus Two <br />somehow doesn’t have that ring about it.<br /><br />Michael Shepherd<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/on-a-wing-and-a-prayer/
