After a while, the story that looks the least believable is the past...

Apologies for the long absence - I've been sick and busy, a delightful combination (note sarcasm). But a glass of fresh OJ and a link to Knopf's Poem-a-Day website lifted my spirits this morning, and I wanted to share a poem I particularly enjoyed: "A Phone Call to the Future" by Mary Joe Salter.

The poem begins,

Who says science fiction
is only set in the future?
After a while, the story that looks least
believable is the past...

...which is an idea that I love: the past, stranger than the future.

Then, after visiting the fifties and contrasting it with today, the poem concludes:

That's what I mean. We were Martians. Nothing's stranger
than our patience, our humanity, inhumanity.
Our worrying about robots. Earplug cell phones
that make us seem to be walking about like loonies
talking to ourselves. Perhaps we are.

All of it was so quaint. And I was there.
Poetry was there; we tried to write it.

Read the full poem.