Parachute Silk

The young people who took part in the summer school were all under twenty years old, and had been invited on the strength of their success in poetry competitions: most had entered or won prizes in the annual Christopher Tower competition; others had achieved distinction in the Poetry Society/ Foyle Young Poets of the Year awards. The participants worked with two poets, Polly Clark and Peter McDonald, to produce poems relating to the story of the fall of Icarus.

The Icarus story is, of course, one which has often exercised artists; in part, this is because it seems to be speaking about art itself, and about apprenticeship: how the novice can be overwhelmed by sheer exhilaration, and crash at the height of his newly-learned powers – powers he can enjoy, but does not as yet know enough about. And there is Daedalus in the story too: the figure who has mastered hidden arts, and can put them to use in the world. For young people learning to get a grip on the imagination, and how best to put together words, as sounds and rhythms, Icarus can be a type of the perennial romantic artist, talented and doomed; perhaps, also, he may seem a representative of such figures’ limitations. Daedalus (however shady his past) may have more in common with the mature poet than romantic readings of the story tend to assume.

Peter McDonald,
September 2003

PLAY

Talk of energy changing form, talk of
ten metres per second per second, arcs,
conic sections; bringing symmetry down
to Earth; flapping for all it’s worth to fly.

Boy Icarus tumbled by – headlong now –
and broke in two. We picked him up and stuck
him back – no harm done – halves held together
with Savlon and plasters. This disaster,
headlong hell-for-leather hurled, is not the end
of the world. But in the end we had to cry
over our spilt milk, wrapped
in feathers and parachute silk.

Tim Smith-Laing

FREE-FALLING

In youth, bounded as though by iron,
dwindling, somewhere on the middle road,
steadied by firm tracks of parental love.

A dizzy bundle of life
                                   let loose on a canvas, clear and limitless,
                         finger-painting his path of messy bloodlike splodges
                                          clinging to his feathers,

fear suspended by a head-rush,
lost in the art of flight,

falling.

                                                                      Defeat impending
                                                                      now feels the pull
                                                                      wounding the earth,
                                                                                        like love’s root home,
                                                                                         tougher than death.

Let’s go

Hannah Briggs

BEFORE THE FALL

"He sets his mind at work upon unknown arts, and changes the laws of nature."
Ovid

The passage out of Crete is closed to all,
the coast swoops

Except those with the ability to leave
The heavy bonds of land, the draw of sea.

shrinking to a slice of yellow

With feathers, wax and string, ambition,
And Athene’s guidance, is constructed,
Grafted onto shoulders, moulded weightlessness.

which swells and subsides as the spray, haze and feathers sparkle,

bird high –

Although to flee with artificial wings,
Minoan punishment for Sicilian freedom,
Is as yet unattempted –

i could sink my fingers into the sky

- though to fly
As if we had been shaped by gods to raze

just as my toes touch the water

The emptiness between the heavens and earth …

in flight, limbs are empty –
eyes dissolve in brightness, lemon light

clouds dive and roar, raw heat stings

and the air around him sings
(leaping with shining water
racing, chasing the sun)

Icarus can fly – why does he need wings?

Harriet Archer

MEDIUM CAELI

Standing on the other side
Then crossing over once more,
And with great disappointment
Forgetting which is which -

“Do Not Walk On The Grass”
It had said;
That was probably why.
So much time choosing left or right
Wasted
Because the bridge always led
To second best.

Feet, weary of the straight path sprinkled
With gravel, blushing to a vital red
At the coarseness of flint,
Wandered hither and thither,
Back and forth
Like Apollo’s fingers
Pinching hotly at Icarus’ back.

Ah yes! enough of left and right,
Now I dream above
To the ether,
I have to shade my eyes
To look at it,
So jealous is that charioteer of his realm.

I would walk off this earth tomorrow
But for him.
His conference,
Held between green-eyed gods
In a glint on the ocean’s skin,
Undid the divine spark
And other unknown arts,
And so sent us plummeting from that higher level,
Where the marble is always bluer.

Angus Wight

JENNIFER AND ICARUS

Tell me, Jen,
Did anybody see you fall?
And did anybody hear you call,
If call you made, before you gave
Your body over to the grave?

Did you run, or leap, or cry,
And did you have time enough to lie
Inside, and believe that you had learnt to fly,
Or that you truly didn’t care,
And allowed yourself to die?

Tell me, Jen, why?
Explain to me, Jen,
I want to understand.
They loved you and you made them cry.
Tell me then, Jennifer,
Why did that not make you fold your wings and stay?

Erin Keenan

THIS HUMAN CLAY

“Was it for this that clay grew tall?” – Wilfred Owen

When the earth grew over my wounded shape
I was calm. There wasn’t much else to feel.
I was left cold by the memory of feathers –
so meticulously cut to fit my short arms –
fanning out across the surface of the water.
After even the fishermen left me for dead,
stopped casting down their rods for me to catch,
my scars breathed like gills and I was hauled to the light,
silver-red and glistening

by my father, feathers still fixed to his body
- a great and terrible golden bird.
I imagined him: hands ghosting across my face,
pushing back the strands of hair,
stopping every now and then to dig
and pant, wipe sweat from his brow
with those same hands. He was never fond of touch.
I was too used to seeing the hands moulding wood,
cutting a thousand children of stone in blank formation,
the neutral feel of reed
familiar to his fingers.

He would understand the rhythm of digging.
My body would be light in his arms
even as it had been in flight: the hands
silently guiding me, strings singed by the sun,
as I whooped and squealed, knowing
what only gods must, drawn to the heat
in a shock of homecoming.

He told me how he saw the plan for our flight;
lying on his back, watching a speck move
across the white of his eye.
If I open mine now, will he notice?
The earth is black on every side,
darker than darkness,
and I am carved into the landscape
in my strange, stiff shape.

Suffocation, I think, is harder than drowning.
I should like to be back in the sea.
Best still, I should like the sun to take me,
make my skin sweat wax,
make me shrivel into the light.
This human clay is dense, I know,
but it melts so easily.

Helen Mort

THE PACIFIST'S SON

He keeps a list of things he hates beneath the pillow:
gossip, widows; naturally, the Hun. Hymns with no
chorus, doves; his parents’ voices after he is in bed –
and this afternoon he’ll go home and add the river,
underline it with special malice for its limp tides
and timid banks, for the light dribbled on its
ripples like thin honey, warm, bright and smug.
With higher banks, black water, heroism would be easy –
but he hates excuses more than he hates his father’s
nose, mouth, chin in the mirror, his father’s eyes,
the stupid tears that clogged them that morning, stumbling
downstairs to breakfast, at the single white
feather slipped under the front door.

Anna Lewis

ANGEL

A fall against the wall of air –
But the wall is insubstantial, and it parts.
His shadow follows, silent, on the waves
(or on the sky; they are the same to him now).
The sun’s embered orb watches a breeze
Pattern the water with waves like feathers.
It soothes the mathematical stitches
And glides along the few high clouds.
Over and under the huge geometry
A shadow begins to grow.

Penny Boxall

GHOST

Held like a gull in the blue air,
outflying summer, I shall leave
the true gods of this world

for the emptiness of sky, its seasons,
a blossom of quiet clouds, the cold
store of love, fear, dreams coming true.

Peter McDonald

ICARUS

He stood on the top step ready to go.

He saw them again, their bodies made
Rough ideas inside the air.
Hunched configurations, not suited as the
Bird’s clean wing to climb and
Cut through sky.

Away from the fuss, he felt, to give the flush
Of someone caught stealing.
And in his father’s whispered hair and spotted
Head he saw how faded …
As he had stood in front while from the back
He breathed through him.

Anna Cordner

NUISANCE OF FARMING

For Jacky Telfer (30.07.03)

In the low field
Usually rich soil split.
Crumble-crust under the plough.

The smell of late-night tavern,
Nuisance of wax
In wood grain. Gate-closed.

White-feather-confetti
Caught in the cuddy’s breath.
Not that fox, wire-wild,

With those hens.
Panicked clucking. Right gan-on.
Worse still

The duccot.
Takes about nine to
Fill you. Ploughman’s

Red Lion, Dipton.
Those birds have
Had it bad late.

Some bastard did them all.
Left eight guineas
At the door. Iggerant.

What use is a featherless chicken?
Aa thought – went down a bomb.
Saves the pluckin’ before the cookin’.

- Still
There was talk of witchcraft.
A curse.

The howdy got scumfished
And wor lass had to
Labour alone.

Later old man Jacky heard
Some kid
Had had enough. Cracked.

Father won’t build him a bogie.
Something queer. A game. Not marbles.
Melted wax and wings. Gox !

Only white mind. Proper little Birkie.
Ditched the speckled banty fluff
Behind the hedge.

Crow still fleein’.
Bad sign.
Aye whey,

Aa heard the splash,
But in truth
Aa didn’t give a broon rat’s arse.

Dhruv Sookhoo

cuddy: donkey; gan-on: fuss; duccot: dovecot; howdy: midwife; scumfished: to choke with smoke; bogie: small low four-wheeled cart; Gox: God; Birkie: well-dressed; banty: bantum.

A MILDLY ERRONEOUS INTERPRETATION OF BREUGHEL'S PLOUGHMAN, TO HIS SON

So now take a seed in your palm,
just one though – we have many seeds,
but take only one for now.

Then place the seed in the soil, in a dip,
just like this. Do you understand? Did you see
the depth? The seed is unhappy too low

or too high, and then we shall
not eat at all. Did you hear me?
You’re just not paying attention,

are you? You heard a splash? Look,
I couldn’t care if you heard the bloody
voice of God. Come on, this is important.

Right, so not too deep in the soil,
for they’ll strive and strive and stop;
but neither too shallow, you see,

for they’ll emerge listless and thin.
Did you hear me? Oh, you’re doing it again:
just leave those feathers alone – the seeds

are so much more beautiful than the feathers.
See the line of the husk.
See how it fits the soil.

So you’ve looked and thought and placed and thought;
now cover the seed with two handfuls of earth
- only two – and pat it twice.

I’m sorry, my boy: I tried to plant wheat
as if it were peas, so all we now have
is that biscuit tin. I just must

have forgotten that wheat wasn’t peas.
There’s nothing to harvest, nothing
to eat but a brim-full

of biscuits-in-tin: a smorgasbord
of Bourbons, crackers, digestives, Garibaldis,
and one old soggy Hobnob.

We won’t eat that one, not till we’re
custard-creamless, my boy, and hungry.
Our final biscuit, son.

So death is a soggy Hobnob – malingering
and slinking – soft like a warm cookie,
but soft like muscle gone to fat.

So balance your hunger; not too low
(for we shall not die malnourished)
nor too high, but thoughtful.

James Williams

Authors of poems

‘Play’ is by Tim Smith-Laing (18), from Tonbridge in Kent. He was a runner-up in the 2003 Christopher Tower Prizes.

‘Free-falling’ is by Hannah Briggs (18), from Menston, West Yorkshire. Hannah won third prize in the 2003 Christopher Tower Prizes.

‘Before the fall’ is by Harriet Archer (17), from Abingdon.

‘Medium Caeli’ is by Angus Wight (18), from Caterham in Surrey.

‘Jennifer and Icarus’ is by Erin Keenan (18), from Fort William.

‘This human clay’ is by Helen Mort (18), from Chesterfield. Helen was one of the winners in the Poetry Society/Foyle Young Poets of the year competition in 2001 and 2002.

‘The pacifist’s son’ is by Anna Lewis (19), from Aberystwyth. Anna won first prize in the 2002 Christopher Tower Prizes, and was also one of the winners in the Poetry Society/Foyle Young Poets of the year competition in 2002.

‘Angel’ is by Penny Boxall (16), from York.

‘Ghost’ is by Peter McDonald, and was published in 1980, when he was 18. Grateful (and belated) acknowledgement is made to the editor of Quarto magazine, in which the poem first appeared.

‘Icarus’ is by Anna Cordner (18), from London.

‘Nuisance of farming’ is by Dhruv Adam Sookhoo (19), from Gateshead. Dhruv won second prize in the Christopher Tower Prizes in 2002.

‘A mildly erroneous interpretation…’ is by James Williams (18), from Bath. James was a runner-up in the Christopher Tower Prizes, 2003.