What Daedalus Did; or, What Joos de Momper Saw, by Lisa Sloan

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, by Joos de Momper (Belgium) 1620s

What Daedalus Did; or, What Joos de Momper Saw

(a poem about a different Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, or what Auden, Williams and Breughel didn’t see coming)
 
Fathers struggle to do the right thing. 
Their intentions are good, and Daedalus is no different. 
His face, turned up to the sky, flushes with pride 
as everything stills, everyone pauses 
to stare in awe at his beautiful, beautiful boy. 

The morning is pristine, a fresh palette hooked
on a painter’s thumb; as if every daub of colour
swirled from a new tube -- 

a red so red it seems to pulse straight from the vein, 
a blue so clean and untarnished, it could be the memory 
of blue before the invention of fire, 

before curls of smoke marbled the atmosphere, 
greens before they were green enough to be called green 
but were understood to be the reflection of holy gold 

when it still poured forth from the sky, scattering its beams, 
lighting the sea and the trees bent forward on the shore; 
the miraculous and mundane, side by side, 

on this stretch of simple canvas where he finds his light 
in the glorious glow of the youthful face, the youthful shape, 
as it soars beyond a father’s craziest dreams. 

Even as the body begins to plummet, twisting and torqueing 
towards him, his features remain dumbly fixed as if 
the boy still soars, as if the plowman hasn’t turned 

from churning rich clods of earth, as if the shepherd 
had not already gathered his flock to higher ground, 
for safety and a better view.

The fisherman’s rod goes slack in his hand, and everyone, 
sheep included, senses that something ominous 
is unfolding in the early summer sky.

They turn from their tasks and wait; ships unfurl
their sails only to crowd into the mouth of a safe bay, 
maneuver for a spot alongside the sturdy quays

Daedalus reaches for his tumbling boy 
whose arms and legs, half screened by black smoke 
and blue flames, spiral around the nucleus 

of his torso; the distressed, shredded wings 
flash before folding helplessly to gravity
and Daedalus, the inventor, finally sees 

the tsunami, the titanic rogue wave opening 
its unimaginable maw inhaling ships, towns, shepherds 
and flocks; plowmen and the hard--worked tilled earth 
just before the splash that will change everything.

Lisa Sloan

Lisa Sloans lives and writes  poetry in Charleston, SC. She enjoys the challenge of writing ekphrastic poems and of finding something new and surprising in a piece of art.  de Momper's piece particularly intrigued her because Pieter Bruegel's work of the same name inspired W.H. Auden ("Musee Des Beaux Arts") and William Carlos Willliams ("Landscape With the Fall of Icarus") to write two of the most well known ekphrastic poems of the 20th century.  She chose to write about the de Momper work because she saw a portent there that was not in the Breugel, and certainly not in Auden's or Williams poems about the work.