“I think when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds, he knew his Pompeii.”
Sean Crawford
“Roaring and flashing hellish light, the volcano poured forth a weird cloud whose top spread out and out. Birds dropped dead from the sky….
Thousands fled at once. They were wise to flee—and the wisest kept on travelling all that afternoon and night. Nothing else could have put them outside the circle of death that Vesuvius was drawing round itself.”
Donald and Louise Peattie, Reader’s Digest Junior Omnibus, page 66.
Hello Reader,
Got fear?
As a writer, as happens to all artists if they progress, I have reached the point where I don’t learn much from the “how to write” books of other writers. Now I am into uncharted “on my own” waters. For example, I was delighted to grasp something from Robert Heinlein’s young adult novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. It was published when a popular cowboy hat and pistol set included business cards showing a chessboard knight that read, “Have gun, will travel.” (I can still sing the theme song for that show about the cowboy Paladin, as the boys sing in the movie Stand By Me)
The teen hero is abducted into a flying saucer by a scary alien from outer space. Then what? During his first night of imprisonment he has a terrible nightmare. Why? Because things are relative. Because relative to the nightmare, he (and the reader) is calmer, better able to focus on the need to escape… Of course that was the only nightmare he had. I’m so pleased I figured that out on my own.
It’s like when I was an abused child escaping into fairy tales with scary witches. The stories made real life easier, somehow. Perhaps our present day black-and-white comic books about The Walking Dead serve the same purpose, in this fearsome and complex society. A little fear is good for us.
It logically follows: If I were to do a collection of poems about The War of the Worlds in Britain, then maybe my first few poems should be relatively more scary than the rest; Or at least involve fleeing; Maybe I could do a prologue from over in western Canada.
OK:
When the Martians Stir, Don’t Stop Moving
I am a scared rabbit.
Wheels roll fast,
my car is hurtling straight down the mountain highway.
The narrow valley has a river, a railway, and mountains rising sheer.
I know how rabbits are caught.
They are channeled into narrow trails.
They put their little heads right through thin wire snares.
I speed as fast as I can.
Behind me the Martians of nightmares are stirring.
Before me, past Hell’s Gate, past Hope,
the valley opens broad and green with room to hide.
Behind me will soon be the blasted wrecks of cars too slow.
The mountains channel the highway as I race for my life.
Thin Martian rays will stab through cars,
asphalt bubbling and sagging.
No breath to scream, no rabbit death-cry.
I drive into the darkening night.
I do nothing but drive.
On a Black Winding Graveyard
Between steep mountains
on the transCanada highway,
the gun emplacements are shockingly bare.
Concrete spools are stripped of their iron mounts,
nothing left to receive 106 mm recoilless rocket guns.
Why?
I speed along, I grit my teeth.
I imagine the freckled soldier boys on their final day.
“Load!”
“Load.”
“Check back-blast area!”
“Back-blast area checked.”
Then the warm slap on the shoulder.
Ready.
Soldiers don’t waste words swearing, not during their tight gun drills.
But—
If they see giant Martian machines striding up the road,
Will they swear, helplessly, as the Martians burn them from the world?
I drive past gun emplacements, grimly.
Past another,
and another,
concrete headstones
on a long black winding graveyard.
Sean Crawford
Calgary
March
2019
Footnote: The guns had been used to trigger avalanches.
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