Poetry | Science Fiction | Fiction
The Other Day the Saucers Came
A response to Neil Gaiman’s poem “The Day the Saucers Came”
Neil Gaiman wrote a cool poem called The Day The Saucers Came, in his collection Fragile Things in 2006. I liked the poem so much that I bought a poster that illustrated the poem.
I framed the poster and hung it on my bathroom wall, which seemed the place the most people would get a chance to read it.
Well…over time, the poem began to annoy me. The illustrations in the poster hinted that a man was gently chiding a woman (possibly his girlfriend) for not getting out in the world.
So I wrote a response, which was published in Fantasy Magazine in December, 2021.
I posted a link to the poem on Twitter, and linked in Neil in the post. He responded and said he liked the poem. We had a discussion about gender, and why I wrote the poem. He was surprised, because he hadn’t intended the narrator of the poem to be any specific gender, and hadn’t seen the poster. So we got that cleared up, and that’s all right.
The Other Day the Saucers Came
(For Neil Gaiman, with apologies. But not many.)
