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  • Writer's pictureKatie Babson

Icarus's Warning

A POEM BY KATIE BABSON

Art by Katie Babson


They never told you about how

Icarus laughed as he plummeted,

beneath the gleaming pearly-hot Sun,

a mouth full of canine teeth.

It was a mournful cry that rang out,

drowned by the billowing wind’s oppression.

he was tragic and strange and beautiful as he fell,

wearing oily wings that waned over his Sun-blistered shoulders;

dripping down his thighs like waxy tears,

white as the peeled skin of stars.

dimly aware of the howling wind that

plucked his feathers blue

and pinched his red face.


a true hanged man.

The razor-sharp heat was suffocating,

his wings: scorching fire and grease;

industrial smoke spewed from his throat.

the consequences for his:

  1. polluted speeches,

  2. bloated arrogance,

  3. all-consuming hunger.

too blind to realize his fatal flaw:


wearing oily wings that waned over his Sun-blistered shoulders;


a failed lost saint.


Even the pink-tinted dawn pitied the folly of the hanged man,

as it groaned under the heaving weight of

carbon imperial thrones

and iron-forged pillars.

Atlas shuddered from ambition,

it smelled of gold and lightning.


a misbegotten man.


But Icarus plunged towards the restless sea.

it glared like a glittering diamond,

almost as brilliant as the Sun.

but his mouth ached with desire for corporate-sponsored

illusions of petroleum and consumerism.

a massacre orchestrated by

the all-consuming ambition of economic

g

o

d

s.


His smog-induced raison d’etre suffocated taxonomic Kingdoms,

attempting to justify ultraviolet swathed midsummers

that hid vacant and molten lies

– he stares up once more,

There are twice as many stars.


a silent whimper.


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