A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1986)

Program note

In Craig Raine’s poem, a Martian visiting Earth reports back on its inhabitants and their customs. His observations are generally perceptive but he misnames things. In a sense we’re in the world of riddles. Books are caxtons, cars are Model T, the telephone is ‘a haunted apparatus’.

When Raine reads his poem he explains all this in advance. A piece of music can’t do that, so I opted for sound effects. The trouble is that they have gone out of date since I wrote the piece in 1986. Police cars no longer have sirens such as the one that chases my speeding ‘Model T’ and the dial tone, trilling ring and engaged signal I carefully notated for my telephone are now a matter of nostalgia. Indeed, no one would any longer describe a phone as ‘a haunted apparatus’. Today, it’s the owners of phones that are the haunted ones.

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home was commissioned by Gerald English, who sang the first performance (of many) in Hobart in 1987, with Craig Hill (horn) and Peter Clarken (piano).

Andrew Ford, 2024

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

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.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves –
in colour, with their eyelids shut.