We are having the exterior of our house painted this week, a long overdue project. On Tuesday the front and south side were completely scraped and the painters sprayed oil-based primer on all surfaces. Consequently, I have been monitoring airflow to the best of my ability all day and evening, but I am tipsy and exhausted from breathing the fumes that made it indoors. Please understand that I have altered Old Postcard Wednesday accordingly for this week by not posting an old postcard, and posting instead this thought-provoking poem.
I am also introducing the art of my great-nephew, Mak. If you are on Facebook you may be able to access his Facebook gallery page here.
A Martian Sends A Postcard Home
-by Craig Raine
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings --
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.
Model T is a room with the lock inside --
a key is turned to free the world
for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.
But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises
alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.
At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
.
5 comments:
space, as Douglas Adams once wrote, is pretty big - you may think it's a long way to the shops and back, but that's peanuts compared to space.
He also wrote that you can scientifically prove the non-existance of life in the universe on the premise that only a finite amount of planets are capable of supporting life and that any finite number divided by infinity is as next to nothing as makes no difference, and so the people you see on a day to day basis are the figment of a deluded imagination :)
Personally - i dread to think where you would even start to explain our culture to a creature from another planet. Imagine trying to explain cars to cats and you have some scale of the problem - they have no common frame of reference.
"So you have these boxes in your homes that show the world outside, and you worship the people that are shown on the box"?
"so you differentiate between yourselves on the basis of colour, religion, social standing"
"So you happily eat some of the animals on your planet, but keep the others as special pets - on what basis?"
Pretty wierd bunch, eh?
Pixies~ I said the poem was thought-provoking, and it provoked some great stuff from you! My mind is running with this topic for awhile, I think......
really cool art work...i wonder too if we have not found life because we are looking for life that is familiar...it would def be interesting making first contact and if not humanoid which at least gives one similarity the idea of learning to communicate is mind boggling....love the comment above as well..spinning my brain...smiles.
That is a fine drawing and one that actually shows noble character in the face of an alien gray. We harbor both longing and trepidation at the idea of meeting a species of star farers largely because we can only think in terms of being dominated in the same way we have overshadowed the other beings who share Earth. How can we begin to consider mutually beneficial relations with alien beings so long as we continue to treat our world with such disdain? One of the things I loved most about Douglas Adam's books was his conclusion that whales were the the planetary species most likely to be contacted and adopted into a galactic community.
Brian~ Yeah, Pixie's comment made my brain spin too! It was interesting that after I posted this the news broke about little old rover Curiosity taking pics that show evidence of water having been on Mars.
susan~ I hope Mak comes here to read your first line. I will try to remember to send him the link to your blog so he can see your excellent drawings.
What a deep and splendid comment. I loved it and loved that bit about Douglas Adams (will look into his books...thank you!).
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