ICARUS [Poem]

What stays with you are
Images that resonate like dreams, or
Cinematic, as only Hollywood Disasters can be
Deck of the Titanic now your office floor
That incinerator tower opposite careening like a Poplar tree
A sudden smudge of smoke across the Bay, a flapping door
A colleague coiled under a desk like a foetus
Grabbing random objects to save
Thirty-nine steps times thirty nine
Then down below, in parks, in cemeteries, watching the wave
Approach on keitai screens, low talking;
Pavements swarmed by office workers on the move in lines
A Biblical host walking, just walking
And always the politeness, the offers of help;
Outside a Konbini, two tiny dogs
Too terrified to yelp
Start shagging and don’t stop
Then later, when you realize that no buildings
Have collapsed, that Tokyo is more or less unscathed
And carries on as life must carry on
You think of Auden’s Beaux Arts poem
The ship that sails on past the boy that fell out of the sky
The torturer’s horse that scratches its innocent behind on a tree
The natural oblivion that accompanies suffering
And wonder how such calm serenity can co-exist
Beside apocalyptic shock from up the coast
How the Sakura buds in Ueno Park persist
How the Spring sun still warms tarmacadam or concrete post
Its all the same, and yet its different:
The balance of the world has subtly changed
Underneath the surface one detects
Something small but fundamentally deranged
Like when you feel an unexpected lump,
The cuckold who fears an affair,
Or the misjudgement on a set of stairs when your foot expects
To land on a step, finds only air.

Submitted by: Simon Dalby, Tokyo