The Choices of Daedalus
By Mark Arvid White
Near dawn he turns and clings to me,
My fingers poised on golden curls,
A thousand steps we have ascended
To this place above the sea.
Behind us, to the riven depths
The labyrinth of my vanity,
Entombed the demon of my ways,
A man-thing slain and sorrowless.
Surrounded by a cache of skulls
The parched remains of Athens’ flower,
Where Theseus in his rage repaid
Unholy child of Queen and bull.
“Father, will my wings grow tired?”
With gentling gaze I search his eyes,
Bright shadow of his mother’s love,
The only good thing I have sired.
“Your wings will match your beating heart,
For I have gleaned from living birds
Ten thousand feathers shimmering,
The gift of flight they will impart.”
“Escape from here your wings will let,
Close to my wings you must fly,
Between the heavens and the sea.
These things you must not forget.”
Yet from the prison I had forged
There comes the echo of a wail,
The souls of youth and maiden shorn
By Minotaur their bodies gorged.
“Oh gods!” I cry. “I caused their pain!”
In fear I wheel my son about,
With hands upon his waist I raise,
“For whose pride are the children slain?”
And Icarus, in dreams of flight,
With beating wings pulls from my grasp,
My breath holding, he walks on air
Towards the breaking of the light.
Featured in New Lyre - Fall 2024
Mark Arvid White lives and writes in Alaska, and has had his poetry, stories, and more appear in such publications as Permafrost, Candlabrum, The First Line, Modern Haiku, and New Myths, along with many others online or in print.
I like 'the labyrinth of my vanity'. For that's precisely what it is, isn't it? We need to build cathedrals to something else. Something more important than ourselves. Then, when somebody attempts to deny or destroy it, we can appeal to something other than wounded self-love.
I hear repentance & grief in this, for belated realization of commission of the highest of crimes.
It would help, as many thinkers have observed, if the inculcation of superstition were banned from education in the most impressionable years.
Experience, observation, independent reflection on these, might help in stemming the bloodtide.
Mercifully euthanizing life of every kind would help achieve a doom-free future, and restore all stolen peace.
The poem's imaginable theme overrides, for me, its oblique, classic, "artistic" style.
Sometime write the same theme absolutely forthrightly, in no uncertain terms. For example:
A Loose Translation
You ask why they love their murderer.
Because its wish is their desire.
You wonder how that could be.
It set them ablaze with wildfire.
You ask its reason for doing that.
To eat you alive and entire.
You wonder why life keeps providing.
Engorgement of parts made to sire.
You ask what inflates those prompters.
What made them its bloodlust's supplier.