Scifaiku by Yvonne Aburrow
Emigrating
it's not the leaving
of Betelgueuse that grieves me -
but the podlings.
Wish I was Earth-bound
and every alien face I see
reminds me...
mining ship
synthetic smell of mown grass:
wave of nostalgia
decaying orbit,
asylum-seekers' spacecraft
- all spaceports are closed
penal colony,
Magwitch mumbles of return -
dim visions of Earth.
scrapping a freighter
we discovered a priest-hole.
Broken prayer-wheel.
happiness
the tree grows slowly
in the place of silence -
a single blossom
Sleep paralysis
whole body heavy
glimpsing a monochrome world
grainy entities
twisting black and white
inside my head - infinite
geometric realm
[I used to get a form of sleep paralysis where my whole body felt heavy & I got hallucinations of huge black and white heavy beings rushing about very fast in a grainy world like an old film. Another one was where I could see into an infinite vertical plane of twisting forms, also monochrome.]
A failure of communication
last alien message
deciphered - "we came in peace,
our ship crashed."
"Fragmented warp drive
destroyed your world - too late now,
deathly hail of bombs."
now and again, ghosts
glimpsed on the edge of vision
- after the rainstorms
terrible mistake
failure of communication
- unbearable silence
who were they?
only memories remain
- fragile carriers
Neighbours
just dropped by Earth
to borrow the terraformer -
only four light years
The 100 nearest star systems
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space." Douglas Adams