ICARUS

by Louise Robertson

Top: Carcass of a bird set alight by focused sunlight at the Ivanpah Solar Generating System (seen below) along the Nevada-California border. Top Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via Earthweek; Bottom Photo and caption: Earthweek.

Environmentalists and animal rights activists are in rare opposition, because birds are being cooked alive when they fly through the concentrated rays of the world’s largest solar thermal power plant, Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in California. Solar thermal plants are excellent means of creating renewable energy and jobs. They help reduce US reliance on foreign oil. But the reputation of solar energy as a whole could suffer unjustly from the charred feathers showing up at giant solar thermal plants. --Michael Howard, Esquire, August 20, 2014

Ever since Icarus took to the sky

we have been talking about nothing else.



At once posing ourselves as the boy, aloft,

or falling;



but also we put on the father's shirt and wings

and grieve.



We paint ourselves into the figures

minding our own business on the ground



with the corn and the book

and the spiked tool.



Over and over, we say where were you when

Kennedy/9-11/whatever happened.



Then the sunlight catches the birds

on fire



who know best of all

how Icarus really felt.



Burn. Burn. Burn.



Louise Robertson has earned degrees (BA Oberlin, MFA George Mason University), poetry publications (Pudding Magazine, The New Verse News, Borderline) and poetry awards (Mary Roberts Rinehart, Columbus Arts Festival Poetry Competition -- twice). She is active as a poet and organizer in her local Columbus, Ohio poetry scene.

GEORGE BUSH PAINTS

by Louise Robertson

Putin by Bush

This is what we artists and open mic 

worshipers have hoped for

all this time with our journals

and rants and sketches, to see

someone so Republican at the altar of

art. One sees the scratchings, 

like our own attempts at the cave wall.

Hands stained red. The trick

of dimension is like a whole extra grade

level. The trick of expression--

however easy to start--

so much harder to get exactly right.

I want to take him to workshop,

talk to him about getting the bones

of it down first. What could this man know of bone

and muscle and ligament

having ignored so much gore in his path:

the scraped and scalloped wartime bodies,

the skulls looking like so many bladders

emptied of their gray and red and black,

the rubble made out of parlors and

kitchens? If that introspection

can come from making art,

if that is one of life's most elusive gifts, if that

is the divine in the human coming out,

I have to say, George: finally.

Louise Robertson has earned degrees (BA Oberlin, MFA George Mason University), poetry publications (Pudding Magazine, New Verse News, Parting Gifts) and poetry awards (Mary Roberts Rinehart, Columbus Arts Festival Poetry Competition -- twice). She is active as a poet and organizer in her local Columbus, Ohio poetry.