Flight Paths

http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-86058531.html
- A short article about Mohammed Ayez that also mentions the case of Vijay and Pradeep Saini. A short excerpt from the section titled ‘The Parking Lot’:

“The West rushes up to meet the migrant, not as the promised land but, instead, a parking lot which becomes for him a desolate, temporary graveyard.”

“Desperate cargo: why ever more stowaways are willing to risk all” by Patricia Wynn Davies, The Independent, 25 March 1997 - http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19970325/ai_n14095781

Reports from the Institute of Race Relations: “Roll call of deaths of asylum seekers and undocumented migrants”.
1989-2001: http://www.irr.org.uk/2006/december/ak000014.html
2002-2004: http://www.irr.org.uk/2006/december/ak000015.html
2005-25/1/2007:
http://www.irr.org.uk/2006/december/ak000016.html

Well, the story of Icarus repeats itself in a Richmond car park. Peter Brueghel’s “Landscape with the fall of Icarus” says it all-the unnoticed splash, the man still ploughing, the pig-headed indifference of the world to the tragic individual escaping human limitations. Another witness is poetry

William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
it was
Icarus drowning.

And Anne Sexton:

Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,
testing this strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn
of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made!
There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings!
Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually
he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling
into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea?
See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down
while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.

and of course Auden:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

One more for the pot:

Icarus - Poem
Literary Review, Wntr, 2001 by Tony Curtis

Out of an English summer morning’s sky
drops an Indian who failed in flight
miles short of heaven. This frozen Icarus
thrown from the wheel-bay of a 747,
splashes into a Surrey reservoir,
cracking the water like a whip.

This poor man stowed away
in the Delhi heat, curled
himself into an oven of rubber and oil,
and dreamed as he rose in the deafening take-off
of food and rain and Coca-Cola
and television where the colour never ends.

The waitress at the Granada stop
tapping in two coffees and a Danish
at the till, for no reason at all,
looked up, saw a bird, or an engine,
or a man, and then nothing
but blue sky again.

Thanks Martin!

Here’s one of many links to ‘Landscape with the fall of Icarus’ online -

http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/icarus.jpg

As you said, it seems perfectly apt for this story, despite being 450 years old - the indifference of commerce (and ‘progress’?) to the aspirations and eventual fate of Icarus.