Ama Kit Xmas Gift - 12_2020

This is a poem I wrote on a whim one day a few weeks ago. I had been listening over and over
that day to the song “Icarus”, by the Crane Wives. The song, in short, represents to me a
movement. The singer is flying, they are rising higher and higher above the heavy and restricted
ground, and they are doing it surrounded by others—particularly their brother, in flesh or spirit.
They keep going forward throughout the piece, though there are hints that maybe things are not
so peachy from the very beginning of the song, until, out of nowhere, the song ends with a new
chorus: “They’re spreading out our ashes in the sun, in the sun, in the sun.” They are dead; the
singer’s tone deceptively remains the same, contrasting with their morose words, but they are
not flying anymore. Their ashes are on the ground, spread out far below the sun they were flying
to. Like Icarus, they were flying high until suddenly they weren’t.
Thinking of that, I wrote a poem to emulate that feeling, that feeling which has become a
common, if unwelcome, bedfellow for many of us this year.