sharks fall out of the sky
Is it time to panic yet
when sharks fall out of the sky,
when cars roll backwards up a
hill and krill eat pizza pies?
Foxes’ heads get stuck in jars,
and robots are writing plays;
castanets click-clack in trees
and bees dance roundelays.
Oh, I have heard of stranger
things than cowboys herding cats,
like juggling whales and humpback
quails and odder things than that.
But as the world goes slowly
mad, one thing I can't deny:
life is getting quite bizarre
when sharks fall out of the sky.
Liz McFadzean
Which of these crazy things are real and which are pure fiction?
There is a spot on a street in Altadena, California where it certainly seems that a car in neutral will roll backwards uphill. All the locals know about it…most have tried it sometime during their teens. I’ve even done it with some of my family members when they come to town. It was one of the odd things featured in the book “Weird California.”
Foxes getting their heads stuck in jars isn’t that unusual. Apparently, they are very curious creatures, and you can find several You Tube videos of the rescues that have taken place in such predicaments.
Just recently I read that Czech researchers are teaching robots to write stage plays. Trees don’t really play castanets but the Jacaranda puts out pods that look like castanets to me. And the most famous juggling whale is Sea World’s Shamu.
I found the photo of the shark on the roof in my computer files from 2012. I can’t remember where it was, but the most famous shark on a roof is called “Untitled 1986” by artist John Buckley and was installed as a rooftop sculpture on a house in Oxford, England on the 41st anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. That was certainly an awful moment in the history of humankind, a terrifying portent of what could happen in our atomic age, intentionally or unintentionally as in the events of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
These days I am most appalled by people being threatened, shot and killed because someone asked them to wear a mask….violence even more repugnant because someone is asking them to keep themselves and others safe from an unseen and vicious virus. How can something so benign be so politicized, to the point of death! The world has truly gone mad.
But man’s madness never has the last word. In the moment of ultimate madness, when Jesus was facing his own execution at the hands of those he came to rescue, he told his own followers, “In me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)
May my poem make your heart a little lighter today.
