When you think about poetry, you might be used to exploring themes of romantic, deep, complex emotions, mythology, self-love, identity and the like. But sometimes these explorations of the self or the world can be expressed through an otherworldliness lense: Science Fiction.
As Wallace Stevens said, “All poetry is experimental poetry.” Aliens, astronauts, the vastness of space, monsters, and clones can all have their place in poetry and still keep us connected to the human condition—poems that blur the line between speculation and reality. The experience of reading poetry can even feel risky, like entering another world, even if just for a few moments.
If you value diversity, weirdness, contradiction and outer space in your reading, check out these out-of-this-world poems for science fiction fans.
Aniara by Harry Martinson
We’re slowly coming to suspect that the space
we’re traveling in is of a different sort
from what we thought whenever that word “space”
was decked out by our fantasies on Earth.
We’re coming to suspect now that our drift
is even deeper then we first believed,
that knowledge is a blue naiveté
which with a measured quantity of insight
imagined that the Mystery has structure.
We now suspect that what we claim is space
and glassy clarity around Aniara’s hull
is spirit, everlasting and impalpable,
that we have strayed in spiritual seas.
Crashdown by Emma Osbourne
Call to me, plugged and
Quivering as I am.
I’m yours, your
Scatterling. I’m a full–thrust and heaving
Creak of outer–skin.
It’s my fuselage that drums; a bent twist and yank at the entry.
You steer — you always have and I’m
Peppered with dirt from the
Last world, the
Lost world — we’ve just left it and already it doesn’t exist.
I’ve dropped from the black float
Here is the fall,
Terminal and swift. It shakes my bolts, tapping threads to unwinding
Though everything is bending deep, like a blind trip into
A forever of
Nothing more until we hit dirt and I
Cling, shuddering
To the loam.
Poem-Rocket by Allen Ginsberg
I am another Star.
Will you eat my poems or read them
or gaze with aluminum blind plates on sunless pages?
do you dream or translate & accept data with indifferent droopings
of antennae?
do I make sense to your flowery green receptor eyesockets? do you
have visions of God?
Which way will the sunflowers turn surrounded by millions of suns?
This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message Beyond
Someone to hear me there
My immortality
without steel or cobalt basalt or diamond gold or mercurial fire
without passports filing cabinets bits of paper warheads
without myself finally
pure thought
lo. by Ceto Hesperia
I circle her, forever her attendant,
but somehow I know she circles me
I am so small in her presence,
a thousand times greater than I,
a thousand thousand, unknowable and vast,
and all are drawn to her.
She is second only to the Sun but to me she is everything.
So many circle her, but she lets me be the closest,
She sings her sweet magnetic song as we dance.
She laughs and sings to me, calling me her sweet little one,
her tempestuous fireball, her favourite possession.
There is something electrical between us,
a loop of hot plasma wraps around me, binding me to her
She has never touched me,
not directly
our love is motion and distance and dancing.
As she moves, as I move, something moves inside me;
a great churning of heat and rock and metal, pulled tight by her voice.
It grows as we move together
a desperate tectonic pressure just beneath my skin
barely contained, straining towards her. She sings, and we dance
she watches me, and I twist in my lust
she sings and we dance
heat and rock and metal
our love is fire and brimstone
sulphur and iron
and she sings
and we dance
and it spills out of me
my breath electric
a violent eruption from my lungs
a fervent volcanic release of pressure.
For a moment I am sated
and I feel the very air is stained by my lust,
a ring around her marking where I have been,
where she has taken me.
But I have marked her too, in my way;
there is a hot auroral glow upon her cheeks
as she watches me dance beneath her
and I know she feels my heat.
I circle her, forever her attendant,
but somehow I know she circles me
Perihelion by Toby Macnutt
For this comet’s path I chose it, carved it
to be our temporary castle. In the act of opening
I let its secrets leak out into the starlight,
exposing this pocked and hissing water-ice
as blue as your seven elder sisters.
I shaped it to us till it shone. It is not terraformed
(this is no earth) but transfigured: a chiselled, burnished fluid.
You descend, shimmering darkly.
The scent of you, of alien metals, diffuses
into my atmosphere of breath and frozen dust.
And of desire: you, nebula-born, you empyrean beauty,
I would see you nova-bright and radiant,
pulsing, brilliant with every cosmic hue.
Yet I have tumbled through so many skies,
and found none to be your match. I have no stars to give.
I hold out my empty hands. As solar wind strokes the ice-wall
into light, into life, my reaching fingers glitter with their gift:
We are the void. (I touch your cheek.)
We hold the stars already,
and we burn, we burn.
Space Oddity by David Bowie
This is ground control to major Tom, you’ve really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare
This is major Tom to ground control, I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today
Here am I sitting in a tin can far above the world
Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do
The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long-distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
