! On A Wing And A Prayer Poem by Michael Shepherd

Icarus
has had a bad press
throughout history
as some sort of moral metaphor
for a man who challenged
Intelligent Design
and/or the gods
and failed, in a narrow-minded view

A young man’s ambition
and perhaps devotion
drew him towards the heavens
why not
and science had not developed very far
so how was he to know
except by experiment

I’d like to think that as he dropped
out of a cloudless Greek sky
out of mythology
out of Breughel’s painting
out of Auden’s mindfulness

he was caught before the third and last bobbing up
by a bevy of compassionate mermaids
and returned gently to land
to live again perhaps under
an assumed name

while the mermaids sang to each other his story
across the seven seas
who whispered it to men
in the off-shore breeze
as a moral story telling how

heartfelt prayer always reaches heaven
there to be taken into account
but science is dodgy, make sure
you get it right and
it will be your servant

and when one day with heaven’s consent
you build a better vehicle to ‘conquer’ space
though how untrue a phrase
perhaps Apollo would be
a safer name since Icarus Two
somehow doesn’t have that ring about it.