A Martian Sends a Postcard Home – Craig Raine Caxtons are ...
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home – Craig Raine Caxtons are ...
A Martian Sends a Postcard Home – Craig Raine Caxtons are ...
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A <strong>Martian</strong> <strong>Sends</strong> a <strong>Postcard</strong> <strong>Home</strong> <strong>–</strong> <strong>Craig</strong> <strong>Raine</strong><br />
<strong>Caxtons</strong> <strong>are</strong> mechanical birds with many wings<br />
and some <strong>are</strong> treasured for their markings <strong>–</strong><strong>–</strong><br />
they cause the eyes to melt<br />
or the body to shriek without pain.<br />
I have never seen one fly, but<br />
sometimes they perch on the hand.<br />
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight<br />
and rests its soft machine on the ground:<br />
then the world is dim and bookish<br />
like engravings under tissue paper.<br />
Rain is when the earth is television.<br />
It has the properites of making colours darker.<br />
Model T is a room with the lock inside <strong>–</strong><strong>–</strong><br />
a key is turned to free the world<br />
for movement, so quick there is a film<br />
to watch for anything missed.<br />
But time is tied to the wrist<br />
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.<br />
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,<br />
that snores when you pick it up.<br />
If the ghost cries, they carry it<br />
to their lips and soothe it to sleep<br />
with sounds. And yet, they wake it up<br />
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.<br />
Only the young <strong>are</strong> allowed to suffer<br />
openly. Adults go to a punishment room<br />
with water but nothing to eat.<br />
They lock the door and suffer the noises<br />
alone. No one is exempt<br />
and everyone's pain has a different smell.<br />
At night, when all the colours die,<br />
they hide in pairs<br />
and read about themselves <strong>–</strong><strong>–</strong><br />
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
The Pylons <strong>–</strong> Stephen Spender<br />
The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages<br />
Of that stone made,<br />
And crumbling roads<br />
That turned on sudden hidden villages.<br />
Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete<br />
That trails black wire;<br />
Pylons, those pillars<br />
B<strong>are</strong> like nude giant girls that have no secret.<br />
The valley with its gilt and evening look<br />
And the green chestnut<br />
Of customary root,<br />
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.<br />
But far above and far as sight endures<br />
Like whips of anger<br />
With lightning's danger<br />
There runs the quick perspective of the future.<br />
This dwarfs our emerald country by its trek<br />
So tall with prophecy:<br />
Dreaming of cities<br />
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.<br />
Nobody Comes <strong>–</strong> Thomas Hardy<br />
Tree-leaves labour up and down,<br />
And through them the fainting light<br />
Succumbs to the crawl of night.<br />
Outside in the road the telegraph wire<br />
To the town from the darkening land<br />
Intones to travelers like a spectral lyre<br />
Swept by a spectral hand.<br />
A car comes up, with lamps full-gl<strong>are</strong>,<br />
That flash upon a tree:<br />
It has nothing to do with me,<br />
And whangs along in a world of its own,<br />
Leaving a blacker air;<br />
And mute by the gate I stand again alone,<br />
And nobody pulls up there.<br />
The Line-Gang <strong>–</strong> Robert Frost<br />
Here come the line-gang pioneering by.<br />
They throw a forest down less cut than broken.<br />
They plant dead trees for living, and the dead<br />
They string together with a living thread.<br />
They string an instrument against the sky<br />
Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken<br />
Will run as hushed as when they were a thought.<br />
But in no hush they string it: they go past<br />
With shouts afar to pull the cable taut,<br />
To hold it hard until they make it fast,<br />
To ease away <strong>–</strong> they have it. With a laugh,<br />
An oath of towns that set the wild at naught<br />
They bring the telephone and telegraph.