Icarus

The era known as the Age of Anxiety stretched from the end of WWII through the Kennedy years and into the Vietnam period.  The fear of nuclear holocaust was as real as our present anxieties about climate change and over population, and it made people, young people especially, focus on existential issues.  Although it is largely forgotten, the so-called Hippie culture of 1966 was a spiritual community, idealistic and innocent to a great degree.  

Mainstream culture was also caught up in debates over religious, philosophical, political positions.  There was a general anxiety about the meaning of life.  People were searching for answers, for freedom, for fun.  It was, in fact, the flowering of a spiritual Great Awakening, the blooming of the New Deal promise, and a truly new, ecological, and sustainable vision of the American Dream.  But those who flew too high soon began to crash, and in public.  We now see it as a kind of collective night of partying and morning hangover.  You fly too high, you pay the price.  

Icarus

Sometimes I fight with God.
We argue back and forth.
Sometimes I raise my fist and I shout,
“What did you do this for?”

Sometimes it’s plain to me
that God is just not there.
Othertimes I half suspect
He’s answered my worst prayer.

An angel talks to me,
and sometimes in my dreams
we ferret out the shadings 
of heaven in my screams.

And when my angel flies away
and leaves me on my own,
I forget most everything
‘cept what’s stickin’ to my bones.

And there, deep in my mind,
I hear an awful sound.
The terrifying cry of love 
that makes the world go round.

I got a choir of birds all singing
all my thoughts in sound on high.
Vibrations bouncing off the ground
enable me to fly,

and fly away, and up, and upward
til I’m melting in the sun,
and crash and burn upon the earth,
and think it all great fun,

‘til the morning wakes me up
and my head feels like a tomb.
The light is streaming in so bright
it clears me out the room.

I look out from the back porch
to the garden and the lawn.
I take a long time staring 
at the flowers and the dawn.
 
Just for a little while
it’s very peaceful there.
just for a little while
I can breathe in the air.
For a little while.

Copyright © 2006, 2014 by David Larstein, all rights reserved.  

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