The Pods - Chilling Scifi Poetry

The Pods - Chilling Scifi Poetry Fear, you are weightier than gravity in pulling the stomach to the ground. Rotors slowed and sound waned as the helicopter sided, meeting the concrete in a road ripping, heart stopping flame. A distant plane plunged to wing tipping contact, its fireball cruel and final. My window pane, an unfiltered screen, showing horrors as I stood with frozen eyes for it wasn’t the carnage that held me, it was the pods that had descended from a blackened abyss of canopying stars. Metallic, cold, like fireless air balloons hanging still in toothless silence equally spaced, positioned and poised from close by to the deep horizon and there they waited, menacingly. I knew I should have shouted “Come away from the window!” but my children’s panes held them fixed as mine was holding me and somehow around, seconds spread into eternity. In un-signalled unison something opened, the pods began to exhaust a cloud; dots, many dots, gushing out, joining masses that emptied out of other pods to a swarm of acrobatic flights of swirls in bewildering beauty. Greying ghosts of trees faded in a haunt of descending fog as flaming grounds subtly hazed to swallowing glows; the dotted mist engulfing all like a plague of otherworldly wonder, and still I stood. I do not know how but in my petrified state I realised the dots were already inside with us; we were no longer alone as the outside had somehow dripped and seeped in… but they were not dots. A soft flow of disturbed air blew in with a hum; they were tiny bird-like creatures, mildly coloured, filling every space as the pecking began. Sharp pricking, almost tickling, pins of beaks smothering chaos across skin and flesh. But these creatures seemed too eager to make their contact as their terrorizing intrusion became short lived, the fizzing swell lost interest, moving on as one and then it was over. Whatever happened in here happened out there too. The pods hung above in the remains of the night as the swarm swirled upon every house, for every person and animal therein and out was systematically subjected to the frenzy of mysterious pecking leaving speechless heartbeats. My body, though, looked and felt unharmed but could it really be that these pods would descend from space and unleash such strangeness upon our planet such fear upon our breath? We may have been attacked, we may have been greeted, or have we been monitored and sampled, primed and readied for further agenda, processed, abhorrently cloaked. The swarm was now distant as I watched from my window, puzzled that an alien attack had drifted on a wind, seemingly to have failed; did planet earth defeat these beings? Did we beat them? I should have noticed my children were no longer watching with me. I should have seen them laying still by my feet. Desperate to react, my eyes drew heavy, dullness surged blanketing my head. Then within a fog of my own I too dropped but just before I did, through my screened pane, I thought I caught sight of someone in the street having been laid motionless now picking himself up before everything went black.