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Icarus, Icarus, though the end is piteous,
Yet forever, yea, forever we shall see thee rising thus,
See the first supernal glory, not the ruin hideous.

You were Man, you who ran farther than our eyes can scan,
Man, absurd, gigantic, eager for impossible Romance,
Overthrowing all Hell's legions with one warped and broken lance....

Winged Man ~ Stephen Vincent Benet

Momentum presses life to mortality
as Sisyphus rolled meeting gravity
an irrevocable descent
mostly gradual
even bird's flights alight
as fixed as the crow arrows
as lightly a gull's landing
in a flash as Icarus soared and slammed the earth
as the hawk lands winging air like a scythe.
Life - cycles of existence
seeming like existence's recycle
with cosmic tides, opposing
pulling back humanity
one two-step ahead every time –
resigned to cradle-to-grave mere fatality
stuck in our personal histories
reliving interior myths
rather than wresting reality, the totality
honoring our blood and heeding the spurn
that our seed survives and the spirit burns
to grow legacies more worthy glory.
Immersed in interior life missing lessons of antiquity
to repeat ages old strife.
From time to time to find, remind
we are beasts emerged from the cave but
straddling a renaissance-holocaust abyss
caught in existence conundrum
lest we hold our soulful subjectivity aloft
and make it History.



© Helga Ross 2004, 2006