Smoke on the Wing

I did not ask to be a seer,

I do not want the curse of farsight,

I sit on a tripod thousands of miles away

From a rocky shore.

Holy smoke rises, sacred incense,

Wreathed in the demise of blessed flame,

I watch a meteor strike the waves-

Flames spurt, oceans roar,

And Nereids cry tears of pearl

As the tsunami of grief roughly laps to shore

The spent shell of - a boy.

Smoke rises from the skeleton of a wing,

Feather grasped in lifeless hand.

Homer gasps and writes reams of paeans

That no one’s lineage will ever read.

***

So much emphasis on the rites of spring,

The welcome return of the sun,

The triumph of the melt,

No one mourns the death of the blanket

That covers Proserpina so guardedly.

She would have had to invent her own abduction,

Ever-summer with her overbearing mother

Leaves no time for the quiet, the regeneration,

The enrichment of the soil for the new growth.

Like a cancer, life unchecked grows uncontrollably,

Stealing nutrients where none can be spared,

Ash for the fertilizer, ash for the cleaning,

But the flames reveal the final fall.

***

What if Icarus already knew?

Rock and hard place, no good choices,

Stay and be slaughtered for father’s defiance,

Or shrivel and die under father’s pain-weary eyes.

What would you do?

Tick that one last item on your bucket list,

And take joyously to the skies

That will receive you – till they won’t.

Allow your wings to melt like winter ice,

Embrace Poseidon’s realm,

Knowing it’s a kinder death

Than one sucked out by millimeters,

A disease straight from Pandora’s cursed fate.

Rather clean, sharp mourning,

Surrounded by true mourners,

Than to have a father’s drawn-out battle

With something he cannot control,

Till he wishes you would just die already.

If Hades must come for you,

Make him work for your soul’s guttering flame.