Excerpt from “A Martian Sends A Postcard Home” (1979)
By Craig Raine
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.
This poem gives the reader a look into perhaps how a Martian would view our little planet Earth if one was to visit. Everyday occurrences such as the rain or a baby are viewed by this creature as strange and distant. A baby is referred to as “a haunted apparatus.” Well doesn’t that just sound like an adorable little bundle of joy? A watch is referred to a device that ties time to the wrist. I like that: the image of taking this obscure, intangible and arbitrary idea of time and being able to contain it in a tiny little machine on the wrist.
For some reason this poem really interests me. First of all, the poet, who is obviously a human, turns himself not into another human but a voyager from space. This raises the question of why he would do this. Although the purpose of poetry is not necessarily to figure out why the poet wrote the poem but more what the poem means to the reader, I think it is still interesting to ponder the effect Craig Raine was hoping to make with this piece of work. Did he just think it would be a nice challenge to write from the viewpoint of a Martian? Or was he trying to make a statement about our world as we know it? Also, is it necessary for a poet, an individual who so often aims to express his or her feelings about life and world via the written word, to sometimes step off of the podium and just observe the world for what it is?
Perhaps this poem exists to remind the reader not to take the world for granted. Perhaps we all too easily accept the way life operates and deny the chance that it doesn’t have to be this way. A car only exists because someone or many someone’s made it. Now the idea of a car, a device that gets the driver (and maybe some friends) from point A to point B, is as interesting as white bread. But maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe it should be viewed as “a room with the lock inside” in which you turned a key “to free the world.” Doesn’t that sound a bit more whimsical and exciting?
Maybe Craig Raine just wrote “A Martian Sends A Postcard Home” because he was a weird guy who really liked space creatures and kind of wanted to be one. Who knows? All we can know is the thoughts this poem maybe instill in our heads and the feelings we can take away from it. Maybe next time I glance down at my right wrist and see an amazing device that captures time inside it I won’t view just a watch as so ordinary.
