by Mary K O'Melveny
We’ve long been warned:
don’t fly too close,
that sun’s too hot,
your wings will melt.
Yet here we are.
A NASA probe,
blinking distance
from spitfire flames,
solar winds, flares,
light speed heat spots
radiating
fiery dust rings.
As a new year
dawns, the Sun will
speak its first words.
Or will it sing
a scorching torch
song that sizzles,
blisters, sears, scalds?
What did we think
when we strapped on
those beeswax wings,
leapt out as if
we knew our fate,
the sea Petral blue,
sun gold-glazed red?
Soon enough we
will learn how far
desire can fly
before it burns,
descending like
a blazing star.
Mary K O’Melveny, a happily retired attorney, is the author of four poetry collections and a chapbook. Her most recent, If You Want To Go To Heaven, Follow A Songbird, is an album of poems, art and music. Mary’s award-winning poems have appeared in many print and on-line literary journals and anthologies and on international blog sites, including The New Verse News. Mary’s collection Flight Patterns was nominated for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her book Merging Star Hypotheses (2020) was a semi-finalist for The Washington Prize, sponsored by The Word Works. Mary has been three-times nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is an active member of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group and her poetry appears in the Group’s two published anthologies An Apple In Her Hand and Rethinking The Ground Rules. Mary lives with her wife near Woodstock, New York.
