Strong Verbs Are Just Better

One thinks of how the details must converge,
the storytellers’ small manipulations
across the wild millenia of firelight,

the father and the son, their unfamiliar
waxy wings, their awkward altitudes
the sea and metal sun withholding judgement,

the young man flying (as he must) too high,
the older man more cautious over whitecaps
as artists, in their turn, who feel both callings,

the sun which lifts a youth beyond himself
the waves below mere space between two points
which must, they know, lead onwards towards that more

pragmatic view designed to bring us Brueghel’s
Landscape with the fall of Icarus,
that seascape with its ploughboy on the left

who pays it no attention; and, later on,
the Auden poem, published 1940,
when young men met again, with aluminium

wings, were plunging bravely through the air
and Breughel’s ‘expensive, delicate ship’ had even
then and even now 'somewhere to get to’

where Daedalus and Icarus, aloft,
on insubstantial wings and powering through
the tricky air, are not beyond re-use.

Best Australian Poems 2016

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