The Fall of Icarus

"Fall of Icarus" by Pieter Bruegel

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how it takes place

while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

for the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who especially did not want it to happen, 

skating on a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course.

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Bruegel's Icarus, for instance:

how everything turns away

quite leisurely from the disaster;

the ploughman may have heard the splash,

the forsaken cry;

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun

shown as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

London Tom-Cat

By Michael Hamburger

Look at the gentle savage, monstrous gentleman

With jungles in his heart, yet metropolitan

As we shall never be; who- while his human hosts,

Afraid of their own past and it's primaeval ghosts,

Pile up great walls for comfort - walks coquettishly

Through their elaborate cares, sure of himself and free

To be like them, domesticated, or aloof!

A dandy in the room, a demon on the roof,
He's delicately tough, endearingly reserved,
Adaptable, fastidious, rope-and-fibre-nerved.

Now an accomplished Yogi good at sitting still
He ponders ancient mysteries on the window-sill,
Now stretches, bares his claws and saunters off to find
the thrills of love and hunting, cunningly combined.
Acrobat, diplomat, and simple tabby cat,
He conjures tangled forests in a furnished flat.

The Call

By Jean Bush

Oh, who do you call,

My beautiful one?

Rising in iridescent splendor

In the dark side of light against the creeping dawn.

A mourning cry to follow ere the heat of day,

Dries up the velvet feathered throats of longing.

A reddened eye of patience waits and watches;

Awash in tall grass, brown eyes blink

Then more as fear leaps to flight in graceful bounds.

But a muscular coat of dusty fur and the ruby spray of death

Insures another day of life and an all too ready hunger.

SEASCAPE

By Jean Bush

Oh, how you loved it, puppy,

When first you saw the beach.

“Sit, stay, don’t dig the sand.”

I had so much to teach.

You barked and jumped and chased the crabs

And snapped at flying foam.

And fell asleep within my arms

As I gently walked you home.

We took long walks together,

As you splashed and jumped on me.

And the years and tides rolled into one

At our place beside the sea.

The dimming years would clutch my fears

As you unwound from life.

And I put you away and there you stay,

So far away from me.

The tide pulls back so slowly

As I weep on bended knee;

But I can feel you run forever

At our place beside the sea.

A Very Dark Night

By Libby Stott

When ever the wood and sea are dark,
Whenever the stars are high,
All night long in the deep, dark park
A bat goes swooping by.

Late at night when the lights are out
Why does he sweep about?
Whenever the sky is black and sad
And people are no longer awake,

By on the shadows, dark and bad,
By on the swoop goes it;
By at the swoop it goes.

And then by it comes back at the swoop again.

In Time

By Jean Bush

If you see me in a circle

You will find me everywhere.

As you pull me ever closer

And you gently touch my hair.

As your burning kiss engulfs me

And the flames reach high above.

I know now you truly mean it

And we really are in love.

As the pain of separation

Keeps us altogether near

And the thought of losing you again

For the next 600 years……..

As the endless span of time

Tells me always that you’re mine.