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.

The Model T

I love this poem - I think it is incredibly refreshing to view the world from another perspective for once. Habituation means that we don't make appraisals of life very often. Today in class someone was saying how strange it is for Islamic cultures to only condone individuals of the same sex to hold hands. I didn't say anything, but I was thinking, why do we hold hands, and why should we think our Western freedom to hold the hand of anyone is the right way? What universal principles govern the urge to reach out and grasp the palm of another? Love, protection, safety, reciprocity? I think unity captures the essence of all of those emotions, and is possibly the reason why we hold hands. Perhaps the Islamic way is more honest than ours - demonstrating that a man and a woman are not equal, and thus cannot present a unified front?

Copyright, myself and a dear friend, 2008

Anyway, I am terribly prone to ramble on a tangent...

I have highlighted the sections of the poem that most appeal to my cognitive palate. I find the last two stanzas particularly endearing, as the hypothetical martian ponders on the altered state of human consciousness that we know as dreaming. The rumination on the human preoccupation with time is also poignant. Many Brits would find themselves lost without knowing the time, keeping to appointments, a calendar and rigid schedules. Is time a social construct?

Did you know, there is a whole movement called Martianism, which aims to present the world (in literature) through beguiling metaphor. Genius!