The Birdman Poem by Leo Yankevich

'In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster...'
—W.H. Auden, from *Musée des Beaux Arts*

He rose to the caws of housewives, the joy
of rooks. And before he could unglue his eyes,
he whistled a prayer to the cold grey wind,
high on years of scrumptious insanity.
The Bagman in the gutter, the Hunchback
on the bench, the Scarecrow under the news,
watched him take off through the willows,
past Jack and the Beanstalk and Mothergoose.

Flapping his wings at the jackdaws, quacking
at the swifts, laughing at the landlocked joggers,
he soared beneath the bright hypocrisies
of a cloud towards the vagaries of God
in the vicinity of the blocked out sun,
but the ants below mistook his cries for dance
and his wingéd tears for a bucket of rain
amid a gehenna of swept up debris.

No sun had cast him down with melting wings
as he dove towards the duckweed in the pond,
watching the little sailing ships depart.
And only the Bagman in the gutter,
the Hunchback on the bench, the Scarecrow
under the news—saw Poseidon hug him
amid bubbles and ambiguous foam
in a heaven that does not mock our tears.