icarus mentor
looking in the box
of balsa wood fragments,
you touch broken wings
and white tail, bright torn
scraps, painted numbers.
you remember how this debris once
dived and swam in the damp air
of a grey, dreich day.
at turns, birds of prey,
graceful robot, space rocket,
then mere lucky junk.
one moment like a red and white dragon,
a splendid Chinese kite alive and then
like a paper box
so excited
that it learnt to fly,
a dancing sprite squirming
and leaping out of the granite
fists of Gravity
at every haphazard turn.
and you remember the boy
with the serious face,
your son with a scowl
of concentration and a small
metal box in his grasp.
how you stood,
your hand on his shoulder,
as, with his feet sunk
in the cold mud, he flew
too close to the sun.
About this poem
This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2006. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2006 was Janice Galloway.
Editor’s comment:
Another new poet, capable of delivering joy and acceptance at the same time in her clean phrasing. Even for the phrase ‘mere lucky junk’ alone, this rang.
Author’s note:
This poem was written for my dad’s birthday a couple of years ago. It is about him and my younger brother Adam.
Adam became ill with a rare neurological illness at the age of 11 but before this he was a keen model-maker and fascinated by flight. ‘Mentor’ was the name of a remote-controlled aeroplane that dad helped him build and that they went to fly in a damp field near our house with a bunch of similarly obsessed middle-aged men. One day it flew towards the sun and was lost from view long enough to go into a dive and crash. Its colourful remains lay in the garage for a long while but it was never mended and this poem begins with my dad finding the box of broken pieces again.
Adam died in September of last year and so this poem, for me, is about remembering ‘the boy with the serious face’. It is about how an instance recalled of someone doing something they were good at and passionate about can conjure up that whole person for you, and how memories can be closely linked with objects so that even a bit of a broken model plane can transport you many years back through time.
