The War of the Worlds by Sarah Crossland

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles read a radio play of

H. G. Wells’s novel, believed by many who heard it to be 

a true, live reporting of an invasion from Mars. Some women 

were even said to have run out, screaming, from their homes. 

That all the night can fit inside one sound. 

That the bull moon, lace-noosed,

witnessed it, welcomed the mothers 

into the otherwise beamless streets 

still crowned with swamp maples, the arc 

lamps swelling light like cotton, 

and since time did not allow for it—a last 

minute of glamour, a gesture of powder 

and paste—their hair carapaced or fell 

undone. In the now empty houses, what they let 

crash in their hurry—a clock, a silver daughter’s 

spoon—allowed the shadows to, as if a fish 

spear, strike. On the radio, each man 

who wandered through the heather turned 

to fire. In the scullery—the voice said,

it was the actor—fronds of red weed 

clammed with the hunger of days, cast 

the room the color of a burn. How we fall

fool to it, even now—the Greeks made fear 

a man who wore the lancered mouth 

of a lion, danced with the wind 

behind his bones. To be afraid, they said, 

was to be of two minds. And the mothers,

already animal, clutched at their smokeless clothes. 

Sarah Crossland has been the recipient of the Boston Review Poetry Prize, an AWP Intro Journals Award, and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, A Public Space, Guernica, Crazyhorse, Witness, and other journals. She currently lives in Charlottesville, VA, where she works as the marketing and communications director for New Dominion Bookshop, the oldest independent bookstore in Virginia. You can read more of her work at sarahcrossland.com.

11 October 2021