The mute ox curses

its cracking knees, circling idly

the small patch of land.

The ploughman senses

his ailing wife’s end

is close at hand.

Running high on debt, low on luck,

the angler casts his hopeless hook.

The shepherd looks up to the skies

as the memories of a lost son

haunt him from within.

Suicidal is the captain

about his love’s unfaithfulness.

And life's bleakness seems to plague all

the passengers aboard that fine ship.

And old trees as ever lament

their dreary, dormant existence.

Sun, disheartened,

by the daily toil of rising and falling 

is beyond doubt

burning itself out.

So, what of a man splashing about

in the calm waters?

Ekphrastic poem on the painting ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus', Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1558.

Click here to see the painting