Icarus Poem by gershon hepner

Scientific laws are very rigorous,
a lesson never learned by Icarus.
He was oblivious of the serious facts
determining the melting point of wax.
Reality he thought he could ignore
when making wings with which he wished to soar
above the level reached by other mortals,
and thus, by pride propelled, to reach the portals
beyond the laws of science with imag-
ination, in a pre-Islamic haj
to somewhere only Helios survives,
if truly there exists a god who drives
the sun around the earth. We know there’s none,
and that the earth revolves around the sun
which moves within a galaxy, the Way
called Milky by the ancients, who were not
aware the sun was part of it. More hot
than is the surface of the sun are laws
of science that should give us all great pause,
like those explaining how the CO2
that we produce may cause the final coup
de grâce for all the planet which like Icarus
now faces rigor mortis, without rigorous
respect for laws concerning what is hot.
The rules of science are no Gordian knot,
and very soon our planet will unravel.
Like Icarus, our problem is the way we travel.

1/8/06