ALIEN Poem by James Harpur

for Grace

‘My soul, there is a country
Far beyond the stars . . .'
Henry Vaughan
There: a planet full of seas and craters
Its mists of light and shadows detailed by
This photo printed on a scrap of paper.

A more than middle-aged astronomer
I scan this map for signs of life . . . and look!
Emerging from the grey - an alien creature

A small unearthly being, here, arrived,
The thing I feared would end my life, the thing
My mother would have died for, had she lived.

Dear soul, did you pick up the fuzzy thoughts
We sent as hopeful signals into space
In search of life and track them to their source?

Now you've landed, I feel the pang of age -
The undimmed glow of drawn-out childhood days
When growing older seemed like a mirage.

Now time is just an issue of dismay:
I pretend I'm one year older than I am
To quarantine each eager fresh-faced birthday.

I'm sad as well because I'll never know,
Probably not, the ending of your story.
What happened when I left? What did you do?

Have children in the sweet release of pressure?
And show them photos of your not-yet parents
Evolving in school line-ups to the future?

Did you shake off my shyness, hermit ways,
And curse an absent God and pointless life
And wonder why we brought you to this place?

Dear little traveller, may you forgive
Ancestral faults and ones we made our own:
Remember that we sent for you in love.

May you adapt and breathe the oxygen
Of this new world, pick up the signs and codes,
Human disguises, masks I tried to learn.

Be blessed to find a kindred alien -
Watch out for eyes, and smiles, and chance remarks
In crowds or somewhere lonely like a mountain

And maybe in the future, the stars uncurtained
On a summer's night you'll show the one you love
The shining home you lost, where I've returned.