Tempted to Tell

It was a good dinner.

Afterwards we settled back

over coffee, and one said:

‘I sometimes think ETs

must have discovered us

by now – don't you?’

How that triggered my inner

cringing fear. Feeling a little sick

I kept so quiet, the dead

might have been more voluble. Jeez!

How could I say I knew this,

and very personally too?

I have been called a sinner

full of wicked lies, my soul black.

And worse than that: raving mad.

After enough reactions like these,

you learn the ways to pass

for normal – never mind what’s true.

************

A little green man? No, taller and thinner.

Limbless, featureless, my friend Kondark

resembled a floating column; had

a good brain though. But please,

where do you find a physicist who’d choose

to telepathise with an alien. Like who?

So he went back home, no-one a winner.

He’d wanted to help us, but needed to talk

with a fellow-scientist. That sort of head,

on earth, does not tend to telepathise

with alien visitors – can’t encompass

that reality, even though it’s not new.

And who could I have told? The stigma

is still too strong. They remain in the dark

the rationalists (so-called) – still led

by terror of the unknown. They’d seize

me and shut me up in the nut-house.…

(Yes I kid you, of course; you know I do.)

Written in response to Poets United's Midweek Motif: Social Stigma.