Come back, flying saucers!
Come back, flying saucers! Come back!
Oh where have you gone and why?
When I was a boy there was never a lack
Of UFOs in our sky.
Arrows and saucers, spheres and cigars,
All we presumed with some home in the stars.
Did you feel unworthy or slighted?
Did you find us absurd and benighted?
Are there wrongs that we can have righted?
If you're home but have yet to unpack
(And aren't planning some deadly attack),
Good saucers, I say you're invited!
Come back, flying saucers! Come back!
In my past-life as a U.S. boy
(A past I'm all but sure was true)
Shy saucers, you were far too coy
To let me catch one glimpse of you.
All the FOs I had ever spied,
However hard my fancy tried,
I'd always I'd—identified;
So my only proof on your behalf
(And who would call it proof at all?)
Was the grainy reel or photograph
(No, none was ever close to formal)
That showed your likeness blurred and small
When TV probed the paranormal.
Or on some page where you would hover—
How your mystery would overwhelm
When I gazed on you much like a lover
And imagined beings at your helm!
But if and when it was your fate,
Poor flying saucers, to be a saucer—
You know, a breakfast bowl or dinner plate
Captured by its shameless tosser;
Or something no more strange, it seems,
Than airplanes lit by solar beams,
Or weather balloons, or meteor showers,
Or the spy-ships of the Superpowers—
Friends, I was never quite so out of touch
As never to have held as much;
And even then I'd found them silly,
Your treks across the Universe
To prowl the Earth then just converse
With—one American hillbilly.
So doubt soon far outpaced belief,
And yet your spell I still am under—
For that first intoxicating wonder,
That encounter with the pure unknown!
Great saucers! It was far too brief!
And where I ask you has it flown?
Come back, flying saucers! Come soon!
Remember us here in the Milky Way,
Third from the sun, with our night and day
And barren little friend, the moon?
We have life! We have intelligence!
(Though if you came in search of sense—
Well, that may just explain it then;
I mean, why you haven't come again.)
But Yeti and Nessie are also two
Who since my youth have disappeared;
And saucers, can it be that YOU,
With nuclear war and winter feared
(And here I almost feel like weeping),
Had whisked them off for safer keeping?
Were all those ships and spheres and tops
The interstellar Keystone Kops,
Assembled for some secret mission
To Earth before we self-destructed—
With steady losses through attrition,
No clear mandate, and little conducted?
And will you once again be swarming
To save us all from—overwarming?
Then saucers, if you're back our way
And happen to recall my story—
My horned toad Rock who’d “ran away,”
If he's in your deep-freeze inventory—
Let me also add a second wish
For Lee my Siamese fighting fish,
And if no saucer has objection
My stolen baseball-card collection.
And my ant farm too. My Estes rocket.
Can you fit a Swiss knife in a pocket?
Bring everything I'm nostalgic for—
Bring Jacques Cousteau and Bobby Orr.
Come back, saucers! Come back to us
From your six-sun Andromeda homes
(That is, unless you're madly carnivorous)—
Hey, I've published my first book of poems!
For old time's take, one more visit.
You streak across the sky. We say,
"Oh my God! Look at that! What is it?"
And what if in your finest day
You were never more than illusion,
A contrivance born of fraud or play,
A fear, a wish, a confusion?
Come anyway, saucers—come as you are,
From our lonely hearts if not from a star.
And if there's extra room in your cab
For Diogenes, my hermit crab,
Bring him along and send me a clue.
A YES! on a billboard should do.
Or leave a message on my phone
Like, "Yo. Y'all is not alone!"
And my door should be open a crack.
Come back, flying saucers! Come back!
