Hello Reader,
Got determination?
After the Martians passed on, leaving behind a ruined land, I imagine the remaining society: A few people would have wimped out, escaping into addictive substances and unhealthy attitudes which they would defend as being perfectly natural. But others would have found reasons to carry on, perhaps for the sake of their surviving children, or other people’s children yet unborn. Grief can be a dragging sea anchor, but still, I suppose, good citizenship is possible when all your neighbors are trying as hard as you are, trying to get healed while stubbornly appearing normal, trying to “fake it till they make it.”
God bless the wounded healers.
When my parents were little, back in the old country, children got an orange just once a year, at Christmas. There is a reference to this (blink and you’ll miss it) in the Tilda Swinton and Ewan McGregor art movie, set in 1954, Young Adam. (review)
Immigrating to Canada helped my parents, food-wise. In Canada, during the Great Depression, my father felt badly about sometimes having nothing to feel the dog; my mother had sores in her mouth, stopped speaking in class, until the public health nurse advised grandma to get some fruit for vitamin C.
Here are two poems.
Guitar by Firelight
As I walk from the cold
into the warm tavern
my neck is bent down slightly,
my gait is slightly uneven
and things are out of joint.
A man bends over a guitar in the tavern.
Some say he’s not meant for television prime time,
not for satellite international broadcast.
I say he is meant for here,
where plain people get a life.
We can see his face shining above his guitar.
Here we know our lives,
tensed then relaxed,
as guitar strums by firelight.
Once, when there was still a power grid,
back in my living room,
I lived in a dying-room
with instant coffee and instant feelings
and paper dolls posed flat on my screen
as I escaped into the mute button.
Such a muffled life.
The artist in the tavern locks his gaze on mine,
strums my heartstrings, and I feel what I feel.
Memories squiggle free.
From my radiant fellows infra-heat billows
around me like a firemen’s rescue hoop.
Such a raw life.
After midnight, a loose upright man
walks out the tavern door.
I am not the same man who entered.
Yearly Orange
The Martians had swept over the land like a plague,
felling people in the streets and poisoning the crops.
Like a rash the Red Weed had smothered farms
jammed canals and blocked harbors.
The Reading rail yard is still a jumble of silent rusting cars.
The Red Weed has gone, crumbled to dust.
Our ruined land is a harsh world.
Thin children are excited
as lean adults quietly talk
about goods speeding under the sea
from the new world, to the old.
In the holds and tubes of a submarine
are spare circuits and seed stocks
artfully stowed without a wasted inch
clean and never contaminated
speeding towards us from New London.
The surface fleet was beamed and shredded,
the same day a storm of silent particles
made dead every child’s device,
every Nintendo, Atatri, Playstation, Gameboy,
leaving the children nothing.
Nothing but the timeless games:
Kick the can.
King of the castle.
Kite flying.
Robin Hood.
A tired adult perks up as children run by,
laughing and smiling.
A girl feels
life is good,
she raises her arms saying,
“It’s all carrots and apples!”
The children will never grow as tall as their parents.
The submarine will be an early Christmas.
Excited kids tell each other,
“Everybody gets an orange!”
We don’t tell them
oranges are good for their health.
Some day,
we will give the children
peaches and cream.
Sean Crawford
Central London
February
2020
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