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.
Copyright ©
Clive Culverhouse
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