Hold The Dark

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Hold the dark, but once you’re lost

home will never find you.

Loosen ties because the clock

will murder all behind you.

The strangest stars are silent still,

the ancient light is bending.

No message yet to warn of

your beginning or your ending.

Rhyme I wrote for one of hubby’s sci-fi screenplays involving deep space travel and time dilation, and you can bet your butt that nothing good comes of anyone in this tale.

Who would want to jump into a ship and travel at the speed of light out into the deep, dark depths of unexplored space? And then by the time you return home, if you do, everyone you know is super old or dead? Well, I thought it was a good story.

But writing screenplays, I’ve found (through hubby), is a little bit like deep space hardcore sci-fi where, by the time you’ve written two or three or five of them, you look up and eons have gone by, most everyone you know has disappeared, and you can never go home again.

Ah, well.


31 thoughts on “Hold The Dark”

  1. Now there’s a blast from the past.
    A poem that rhymes!
    Haven’t read one of those in ages. Tee hee.
    And a good one it was.
    Anyone who’s got the stick-at-it-ness to write a fair dinkum screenplay deserves a complimentary bag of light sabre crystals, in my book.
    Good on hub.
    And yeah… must take a while to write, for god sake!

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    • Thanks, Glen. You know what, it’s not actually how long it takes to write them. It’s the years that go by with an exciting response here, a promising response there, the verge of a meeting here… and in the end a big goose egg to show for any of it! 😦

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  2. Stace, I give you ‘The Space Widow’s Lament’ in return for your fair words.

    Sweep the yard, and grok the sky
    Faint glow of ancient history
    Untold miles, forgotten smiles
    Above all, has he missed me?

    His sleeping child, eyes green and wild
    As Daddy chases space goals
    My wrinkle here, his twinkle there
    Can love squeeze through a wormhole?

    Can time be bent, round firmament?
    Will distance make him wary?
    Horizon haze, Wisconsin days
    Amorphous, endless prairie

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    • Wow, how apropos!! I canNOT believe they managed to rhyme “wary” with “prairie”!!!! That’s a good one, Kev. An updated kind of “widow’s walk” longing, except he’s in space instead of the sea. Thanks for sharing!

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    • Haha. Thanks, Glen. Yes, they’re all doomed, to say the least. No Disney endings here! (And who knows if people can even DEAL with that these days. After all, it’s not the ’70s anymore…)

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    • Hi, Ritish, thanks for stopping by, and thank you!
      Yeah, the space stuff is fascinating. Especially when done well–like 2001, Alien, Solaris, parts of Interstellar…
      🙂

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  7. Here I go quoting a sci-fi book title that has always fascinated me. It’s almost poetic, with just a few words. It really intrigues me… It’s by Robert A Heinlein and I’ve never read it!

    “HAVE SPACE SUIT – WILL TRAVEL!”

    Just that small few words for a title radiates so much imagination. I almost don’t want to read it. I know I have to and I will love it but……..

    I can’t even fathom what it must be like to actually write? Let alone give science fiction a go. Though, I guess you can be in two camps? One, just make up random stuff and see where it takes you, or the other, that you really have to do your research and be as scientific plausible as you can. Either way you gonna upset some one on Earth or some planet, far far away. lol.

    I love space and adore sci-fi. The Expanse did science fiction justice as a TV series though unfortunately after 3 amazing series there could only be one destination for the rest of it? A rather large, well expansive, hole to drop down in. I still loved it though.

    Big up respects to your hubby for keeping up the creative hard work and thank you to you for sharing your most excellent poem.

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  8. Big thanks, Wolfman, for your enthusiastic response! I’m gonna pass the title along to hubby in case he hasn’t read that one.
    I know what you mean, too. I can’t write sci-fi either. And even though I don’t care about people making stuff up, hubby goes ballistic when something is supposed to be straight up sci-fi but then defies some law of science.

    He was sighing heavily when Matthew’s ship “clipped” the “frozen” clouds in Interstellar (HOW DO THEY STAY UP? he demanded later) and always bitched about the fact that in Inception, they never explain HOW they get into other people’s dreams. He complained about the unrealistic gravity situation in the gigantic compounds on the moon in Ad Astra (too expensive, apparently, would never happen) and I forgot what his problem with The Martian and Ex Machina was.

    You and he share adoration for The Expanse, though! (Although he wasn’t pleased with the ending).
    I thought it was a pretty good ending, lol !

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  10. Haha. Thanks, Glen. Hubby is unintentionally hilarious a lot. And I did ask him about Have Spacesuit–Will Travel by Heinlein and, of course, silly me–he read it when he was a kid. He looked at me like I was insane, like asking him if he’d missed a Heinlein book was a complete dissociation from reality.

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  14. Well, it’s a fantastic poem–that I know. I’m sure your hubby’s screenplay(s) are very good also since you vibe that they are. I can’t imagine that you’d be married to someone who didn’t have writing chops. Anyway, that last stanza–it’s stunning.

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  15. Pam, you’re too kind. Thanks for your positivism! Funny thing, though, about being married to another writer: sometimes not as complementary as one would think. Especially when it comes to the ongoing symbolic wrestling for “creative” time. Who gets the silence and the “writing bubble” for a while and who doesn’t, lol

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  16. I can relate to the creativity space tug-of-war at times. Sometimes silence is what you want and then again, maybe not–and your partner wants something else. But then you find common ground and even collaborate. Is your poem now part of your husband’s screenplay? That’s cool, if so. It’s got a great vibe to it!

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  17. Hi Henry! Thanks for dropping by. Yeah, the poem’s included in the screenplay. The character calls it “The Mariner’s Tale,” or something like that, something found that’s hundreds of years old. This is an old screenplay, though, pretty much not going anywhere right now. But thanks! I was pleased with the poem’s final “vibe” too.

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  20. Good poem with seamless cadence. Very cool on hub writing sci-fi screenplays. I know you live in the place where US movies are made. Has he tried any other country? When I do my film reviews, I notice a lot of movies are being made in Canada. Argentina has made some danged good movies. Scandinavian countries have made a lot of good sci-fi films. If he could get his script to Guillermo or Villaneuve, oh wow, I know they would do them up right.

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  21. Thanks, Li. I just broke out in goosebumps imagining Guillermo making hubby’s movie, lol. Villaneuve too, but especially Guillermo. Or the director of The Revenant, if he did sci-fi. *sigh*……………

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  22. I guess there is a reason why life is finite, and space travel, not so long ago, before rockets became not a fantasy.
    The good thing I just have enough to make the best of this life, without worrying about the problem of return into to a distant future!
    But I love how the poem conveys it so well, with few words.

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  23. Oh, man, I agree wholeheartedly. I have enough to deal with here. Outer space and its attending stars and planets will have to wait! Thanks a lot, B.H. 🙂

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  24. Yeah, I’m not into flying into space and coming back to find everyone super old or super dead. I just saw an article that folks are worried about samples from Mars coming back to Earth…whether we’ll have the proper protocols to house and examine them…concerned with an unknown space virus infecting us all. Here’s an idea…don’t bring anything back from Mars. Problem solved. I am so into poems that rhyme. They require more discipline, and I am very old school in that regard. It seems now anyone jots down a couple of thoughts…and there’s a poem. Sci-fi writing…have never gone down that road, but I see the problem of thinking you have a blank canvas because there are some “unwritten rules” to be followed when it comes to space and time.

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  25. Hi, Bruce. Thanks for stopping by! Um, yeah, I’m not into space…PERIOD. Opposite of hubby. As for Mars–good idea, haha. Do NOT bring it back. Treat it like Vegas: what happens on Mars stays on Mars.
    But do they listen to us? Noooooo.
    As for the sci-fi….it depends on the kind. There’s soft and then there’s hard core. But most people write the soft one where they can just kinda do what they want. That’s when hubby’s head comes off. We (he) had high hopes for Ad Astra, for example (which I liked most of; the ending was meh) but his list of “that would never happen” is long. That’s just him, tho. Most people just wanna have fun. Which is why, I guess, like we were saying on YOUR blog, Avatar was so popular. No thinking. Just eat the popcorn, lol

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