Pride Goeth Before a Fall or Ambition goes awry

 

Waiting in impatience for
flight to be invented,
Icarus flipped his lid.
Why wait? he quipped,
gazing at the sky,
yearning to fly beyond
the limits of the known world.

He gathered components
stealing some –
never being one for discipline –
begged plumes from birds-
and wax from bees;
made strong string
from leaves;
cobbled all together
into a contraption
Now he’d discover whether
miracles really happen.

He climbed Mount Olympus
as a handy take-off point,
for his heroic moment,
strapped on his clumsy apparatus,
leapt with sublime divine afflatus
into the unknown.

For a moment or two,
free-flight brought cries of joy
until the boy, in careless rapture
soared too high to Phoebus capture.
Beeswax melted
spare parts dispersed
Poor Icarus cursed
and dived head first
to painful perdition.

Father Daedalus, on solid ground,
acknowledged the prudence he had found
in the words of the prophets –
“It will all end in tears.”
And it did.

Fables are the order of the day at dVerse – new or old all welcome.  So I resurrected an old one of mine, which is also a very old story with a moral.