! On A Wing And A Prayer

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