Planet Parenthood
How would you ever know
that you’re not an adopted alien?
that you’re not being kept
in a carefully constructed artificial habitat,
where you would never notice
your captivity and your spurious life, not feral
but never tame,
one day coming to a strange awareness
of the impossible, like waking late in an afternoon
to find that a book written in a language you’ve always known
has mutated to vertical rows of ominous symbols,
as if you were to discover,
in the freezer compartment of your refrigerator,
snow from another world.
©2000 F.J. Bergmann"Planet Parenthood" appeared in Spire—Spring 2003.