SPACE ODDITY

Here's a piece of lighthearted Flash Fiction about alien abductions. In the prevailing political climate, with each day more dispiriting than its predecessor, who wouldn't welcome the opportunity of being beamed up and whisked away from it all? 

                                                      STRANGE MUSIC

The day the spaceship came we barely noticed it at first even when its shadow fell across the avenue like a great shark. But once the haunting music began we all stopped and gazed upward as though hypnotized.
Perhaps if, instead, we had scattered like minnows, things might have turned out differently.
It began very slowly at first.
Ron Bradshaw stopped washing his Jaguar and, like me, stared open-mouthed up at the great ship suspended above us. Suddenly he began to levitate.
Up he floated, looking like an escaped balloon, his red cardigan vivid against the blue sky.
Janice Williams went next: with a short cry, she too began to rise, with Toby, her dachshund, paddling furiously beneath her at the end of his lead.
Moments later, people who’d come outdoors to stare began to drift upward like dandelion-seeds on a soft breeze. Gradually the sky was full of them, a rag-tag collection of scarecrow figures rising towards the shining spacecraft that hovered above us: lads in baseball-caps, still clutching their skateboards, girls with push-chairs, the daft old lady from number 12, an Amazon deliveryman: one by one up they went.
In the distance, I spotted a host of other figures rising like bubbles towards an open hatch in the belly of the silver ship and, all the while, the strange, unearthly music continued.
It was then that my pacemaker decided to malfunction. One moment I was gazing with wonder at a scene beyond imagination and the next I was lying on the ground. I must have passed out, for when I opened my eyes again the people had all disappeared and the spaceship was leaving. As the strange music grew fainter and more distant, an overpowering sense of desolation overwhelmed me. I sat on the pavement and wept like an abandoned child.

ASSASSIN'S DEED

John F Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States was assassinated at 12.30pm on 22 November 1963 while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
The President was travelling with his wife Jacqueline and Texas Governor, John Connally, also with his wife, when he was fatally shot by a sniper, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was hiding in a nearby building.
The assassination evoked a stunned reaction worldwide and in America that fateful day people wept openly and gathered in department stores to watch the television coverage. Traffic in some areas ground to a halt as the news spread. Schools dismissed their students early.
The event left a lasting impression throughout the world and many people today can remember where they were the day that President Kennedy was shot.

NOVEMBER 1963

The motorcade moves steadily,
as time does, towards history.
Three limousines, sedate and slow,          
glide through the Dallas noonday glow.
A white Ford leads, while, at the back,
sleek as a shark, a Cadillac
and in between, smooth chrome and mirrors, 
a Lincoln Continental purrs.
Outriders, vigilant and keen,
tough cops, cool, muscular and lean,
on Harley-Davidsons, survey
a festive, jubilant display.
The President, young, debonair,
beneath a boyish mop of hair,
shares with the world his winning smile,
his charismatic sense of style.
His modish wife, serene and proud,
waves to the rapt, adoring crowd
of smiling faces, black and white,
expressions optimistic, bright,
that sways excitedly to cheer
as, steadfastly, the drivers steer
to Dealey Plaza up ahead,
a routine job, no cause for dread,
nothing to hint that, from today,
small screens will constantly replay
the coming moments, frame by frame,
as devotees call out his name,
JFK, Kennedy ... a hymn.
The noonday light appears to swim
as, past the captivated throng,               
three cars cruise steadily along,
one hard-top car, two open-top,
into the moment time will stop,
into to the space that fate dictates                             
where Oswald, the assassin, waits.

BIRD CONFINED

October in Guernsey ended in a series of wet, dismal days and the forecast for much of November promises similar gloom.
Trapped indoors and feeling decidedly under par, I am experiencing a crushing sense of confinement and attempt to distract myself by rummaging through stacks of paper in the hope of discovering some abandoned poem or story to retrieve and rework.
This short one came to hand. No reworking is necessary.

THE CAGE

The child’s attention is engaged
by a red fire-finch, captured, caged.
Man steals the fire-finch from the wild.
Time steals childhood from the child.
How similar are both their fates.
The cage of adulthood awaits.

LET'S DANCE

It’s disquieting when a child discovers that its parents have identities other than those of Mother and Father and that the stranger hidden within the familiar shape has his or her own fears and yearnings, dreams and doubts. 

HIS MOTHER DANCES

Crouched on the stairs, he sees her dance:

her feet glide over lino squares,

the wireless playing sweet and low.

She waltzes, as though in a trance,

alone, amidst pans, table, chairs, 

white kitchen sink: her eyes aglow.

Those slender arms grasp empty air:

her partner is invisible.

She circles, sweeps and murmurs words,

song lyrics or a lover’s prayer.

What seems to him incredible

is how the music, like small birds,

whirls round his sleepy, tousled head

and makes him sad. The dancing stops.

His mother, hungry for romance,

settles for washing plates instead;

talks to herself, while he eavesdrops.

His father never liked to dance.

LEST WE FORGET

A short poem for Remembrance Sunday.

 





TRENCH RAT                                                     

A battered Woodbine is a precious thing.  
If you can light the bugger, better still.
Inhale the harsh, uplifting, acrid smoke   
and, for a fleeting moment, you’re a King.   
Dear old King George can keep his best cigars
and damn Lloyd George, 
may that sly bastard choke. 
It’s him and and not the Hun I’d choose to kill
to end this bloody war to end all wars.

SHELL SHOCKED

The recent news story of the tragic deaths of 39 illegal immigrants from Vietnam found dead in a refrigerated lorry in Essex brings to mind another terrible incident back in 2004 when 21 illegal workers, all Chinese, were drowned by fast-rising tide whilst cockle-gathering in Morecambe Bay.
Here is a poem I wrote at the time.











THE COCKLE-GATHERERS

We found them difficult
to love, despised
their foreignness
and could discover
in those bland,
concealing faces,
no vestige of ourselves.

Their exile presence here
was deemed invasive.
We shared with them
no culture,
no common aim.

Their language
set them apart; built a great wall
between us, their so-reluctant hosts
and them, the strangers,
hungry to seize
those beastly jobs
no native beast would do.

To destitution, famished dreams,
into the grasp of greedy men,
in numbers, unrecorded,
they came regardless,
fleeing, in a hostile land,
without a single English phrase,
a past beyond imagining.

There on a northern, winter shore
suddenly,
in language universal,
their frightened voices
spoke to all the mongrel souls of men
spawned from a common source.

The tide
of panic rising
with the sudden water;
the hopeless cries;
cold darkness
sucking life away.

REGENERATION

As we enter what I think of as 'the dead season' I cast around for uplifting images to ward off the inevitable melancholy of November.
This villanelle, which I wrote a decade ago, still pleases me with its optimism. 

 








THE WORLD STOPS TURNING

The world stops turning then begins again
and suddenly, abruptly, change has come.
Blooms burst in deserts fresh with gentle rain.

Rain-forests rise, reach heavenwards, attain
full grandeur, scorn the chainsaw’s hum
The world stops turning then begins again.

The bare ravine becomes a verdant glen.
Trees blush with fruit. Famine is overcome.
Blooms burst in deserts fresh with gentle rain.

Bright birds repopulate a blighted fen.
Fish spawn in rivers where there once were none.
The world stops turning then begins again.

Returning life reclaims its lost terrain,
a verdant place beneath an orange sun.
Blooms burst in deserts fresh with gentle rain.

Old men grow young, straight-backed, forget their pain:
they shrug off leaden years, so burdensome.
The world stops turning then begins again.
Blooms burst in deserts fresh with gentle rain.