[Newspoetry] The Day the Earth still stood…

[Donald L Emerick]

The Day the Earth still stood


Klatu mirado nictu.

Perhaps those are words,
Anglicized, of course,
or somewhat better yet,
Arabized, phonetically,
Synonymically, as it were
Reproducing sounds –
In such signs for sounds
As we Anglicans make,
On theses born of fidelity,
a widely accepted ritual,
to host the wholly other,
in our symbols, hostage.

There’s a debate, of course,
Over a vowel as short or long,
Or where accent gravely falls;
Even, remotely, some parse out
syllables, how letters subdivide;
Esoterics worry punctuation
to reflect our sentence types
may be unlike the alien tongue,
Itself yet unobserved in situ --
Slit or slot or gash, if orifice,
May produce sound sans organ
Wagging like a puppy-dog tail.

The sounds meant nothing to us:
We opened fire on the weird alien,
For fear its message, as a warning,
Might tempt us, provocatively,
To abandon our pre-emptive safety
And sacrifice our security breaches.

If violence strings a message,
Death surely sings its tunes
As bullets play its bald ballad
In notes written into anybody.

The Earth still stood as it did
The day the Earth stood still,
Again, as once it did for Joshua,
when the Aliens all died, then, too.