Commuters and Icarus in the Brexit Snowstorm
a poem grounded in W.H. Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts
Beyond Seacombe Terminal’s high-reaching arch snow falls
silently, large-flaked, through every streetlight’s glare
but it does not concern them
though Pieter Bruegel notices
from beneath his broad-brimmed hat how it touches
umbrellas, beanies, hoods above head-bowed faces,
of those who don’t look up when a young man flies past,
flaps his slow wings, loses height, reaches the Mersey
or hear his wail before he hits the black water
then soundlessly sinks
but Pieter Bruegel recognises
the end of this aspiring high-flier matters
because, about economics they were never wrong,
those distant offshore investors, who told everyone
they should, or would, or could believe in sunlit days
and ignore fears that snow will make wings too heavy
to carry anyone far
so Pieter Bruegel watches
those who don’t notice as they shuffle in the queu
the pavement and road now resemble a shroud.
Snowflakes stick to eyelashes, melt, people blink
as they long for the bus to offer them noise and warmth
away from what they don’t know has happened,
what will make grief rise up in someone like them,
when one knows
what Pieter Bruegel knows
when he’ll paint what he’s seen as if it happened
at mid-day in sunlight and somwhere else.
Bob Cooper lives on The Wirral. This year, his poems are appearing in Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review, Orbis, High Window, The Waxed Lemon, London Grip, and Ink Sweat & Tears. His last Collection, Everyone Turns, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017.
http://www.pindroppress.com/books/Everyone%20Turns.html
new boots and pantisocracies 