Adela Najarro – Poetry

Icarus Falls Through

(with a nod to Auden and Williams) 

So much goes unnoticed
as we reach for the sun.
His name was James.
He worked at an oil refinery.
All Icarus had to do
was follow
his father’s flight plan,
but he fell into want.
Wanted more. And more. And
the never enough.
And so, a story of melted wax
and soggy feathers,
how we shouldn’t desire
too much. Icarus ended
abruptly—an unseen splash
next to a ship urgently
sailing onward.
The old masters
got it right: suffering
takes place during
the everyday stroll
along paved suburban
sidewalks or while
we pop open a cold
bottle of lite beer.
We don’t see.
We don’t notice
how easy it is
to drown alone.
Unlike Auden and Williams,
James didn’t plan
the Icarus metaphor. Simply,
the utility belt lifted
off the pole
and he fell.
An electrician
at work, falling,
falling through multiple
electric power lines.

Adela Najarro’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals and can be found in the University of Arizona Press anthology The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. She teaches in the Cabrillo College English Department and is on the board of directors for Poetry Santa Cruz. Her extended family’s emigration from Nicaragua to San Francisco began in the 1940’s and concluded in the eighties when the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. She now calls Santa Cruz home.