Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by Eileen Ivey Sirota

Landscape with the Fallof Icarus, by Pieter Bruegel (Netherlands) 1555

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
(after William Carlos Williams)

Most days I would tell you I feel like the peasant 
scratching his ass at the bottom of Bruegel’s painting,
humming perhaps,
perhaps thinking of the apple in his pocket.

But once I felt as Bruegel must have--
that attention must be paid.  
It was the day in March my first parent died, 
the day my father died.

Rushing across the street to the assisted living,
cell phone in hand, spreading my news, 
unreality increasing with each retelling,
an ordinary, faceless day turned singular.

Unconcerned, the children and nannies in the park
played around the fountain, workers from nearby offices
carelessly tossed away their sandwich wrappings.  
Daffodils elbowed their way hopefully through the thawing earth. 

Eileen Ivey Sirota

Eileen Ivey Sirota is the author of one chapbook, Out of Order, published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press.  She is a psychotherapist, potter and poet who has come late—but enthusiastically—to the party which is poetry.  She lives in Bethesda, MD where she has been hiding out from Covid, tolerating Zoom and similar technologies, and writing.