Ray Bradbury - Where Robot Mice And Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns

Within your hour of birth

He touches hand to brow, He whorls and softly stamps

The ridges and the symbols of His soul above your eyes!

But in that selfsame hour, full born and shouting

Shocked pronouncements of one’s birth,

In mirrored gaze of midwife, mother, doctor

See that Thumbprint fade and fall away in flesh

So, lost, erased, you seek a lifetime’s days for it

And dig deep to find the sweet instructions there

Put by when God first circuited and printed thee to life:

“Go hence! do this! do that! do yet another thing!

This self is yours! Be it!”

And what is that?! you cry at hearthing breast,

Is there no rest? No, only journeying to be yourself.

And even as the Birthmark vanishes, in seashell ear

Now fading to a sigh, His last words send you in the world:

“Not mother, father, grandfather are you.

Be not another. Be the self I signed you in your blood.

I swarm your flesh with you. Seek that.

And, finding, be what no one else can be.

I leave you gifts of Fate most secret; find no other’s Fate,

For if you do, no grave is deep enough for your despair

No country far enough to hide your loss.

I circumnavigate each cell in you

Your merest molecule is right and true.

Look there for destinies indelible and fine

And rare.

Ten thousand futures share your blood each instant;

Each drop of blood a cloned electric twin of you.

In merest wound on hand read replicas of what I planned and knew

Before your birth, then hid it in your heart.

No part of you that does not snug and hold and hide

The self that you will be if faith abide.

What you do is thee. For that I gave you birth.

Be that. So be the only you that’s truly you on Earth.”

Dear Hopkins. Gentle Manley. Rare Gerard. Fine name.

What we do is us . Because of you. For that we came.

Though Queen be gone, the drones come back to hives;

I am the residue of all my daughters’ lives.

I keep their old loves here, I am the friend

Of all the lost, the sad, discarded, gone, made end.

Their husbands are now mine, their lovers keep

In touch with me, they telephone to weep

On loves that, soon as lost, now are my kin.

Somehow the old sins, shunted off, wind up my sin.

I take those loves to lunch. I buy them wine;

Although these boys-grown-men were never mine.

What is this thing in me which, dumb, demands

The keeping up of face, outstretch of hands?

Why must I tend their graveyard with chill stones,

Why say hello to those young bags of bones?

Those scuttled marriages gone sour or dead

Whose ruin runs my blood and cramps my head—

Why should I dine this mortuary gang,

Why not pay out Time’s rope and let them hang?

Because, because, well now, again because—

Mayhap I drown in male’s dread menopause,

And tend to see my face in these I dine

To drink too much of sad lust’s mortal wine.

Oh, women often cry they were sore used

But these boy/men were much the same abused;

If men shunt off the fainter sex with guile

Why, women, daggerless, slay with a smile.

What do these lovers hope to gain from me?

An echo of her flesh now found at tea,

The sounding of her voice but dimly heard

Her beauty ricocheted and drowned, absurd

In maze of old genetics yet there kept,

Some wakening of love that now is slept?

An echo of her voice in some mere phrase,

A flicker of her glance in old beast’s gaze?

They come to find the lamb in lion’s paws,

But something in my laugh now gives them cause

To order more and more and deeply drink,

Though Lovely’s not my name, I clearly think.

Ah, well, to stand for her is not a shame,

And if the echo pleases them, what blame?

Years back I saw an old love’s sire one day,

And round about his smile I saw the fey

Sad, far, lost echoing of one mad year

Which ravened me to frenzies and wild fear.

So if a father’s teeth can cage a cat,

Why here behind my eyes, beneath my hat,

A girl before her time waits to commence—

Young men, I have no heart to cry: Go hence!

So stay awhile and hear her voice in me;

But, please, no tears, no funeral salt at tea!

Thrown out of Eden

Now we headlong humans

Sinners sinned against

Return.

Tossed from the central sun

We with our own concentric fires

Blaze and burn.

Once at the hub of wakening

And vast starwheel,

For centuries long-lost, and made to feel

Unwanted, orphaned, mindless,

Driven forth to grassless gardens,

Dead and desert sea,

We were shut out by comet grooms like Kepler

Galileo Galilei

Whose short-sight probing light-years

Upped and said:

The Hub’s not here!

So shot man through the head

And worse, each starblind prophet killed a part,

Snugged shut our souls,

Chopped short our reach,

Entombed our living heart.

But now we bastard sons of time

Pronounce ourselves anew

And strike fire-hammer blows

To change tomorrow’s clime, its meteor snows.

Our rocket selfhood grows

To give dull facts a shake, break data down

To climb the Empire State and thundercry the town;

But more! reach up and strike

And claim from Heaven

The Garden we were shunted from,

For now, space-driven

We fit, fix, force and fuse,

Re-hub the systems vast

Respoke starwheel

And at the spiraled core

Plant foot, full fire-shod

And thus saints feel

Or yeast like flesh of God.

We march back to Olympus,

Our plain-bread flesh burns gold!

We clothe ourselves in flame

And trade new myths for old.

The Greek gods christen us

With ghosts of comet swords;

God smiles and names us thus:

“Arise! Run! Fly, my Lords!”

It was a smother of Time, a crumbling of white;

The night gave way in hysterias trembling to cold,

Grown old and falling apart, let its white heart go

And slow and slow in a withering slide from the dark

The snow fell down and down with no lantern nor spark

Nor star nor moon to show its fracture and fall

Appalling in all its shivering shaken chill dusts

In soft clamors and tremors of panic it touched my sill

Like an old woman begging the storm to keep warm with mere crusts

And make do on my cat-couching hearth

Where a teakettle cinnamon puss kneels and folds

And beholds a soft inner contentment, a bumblebee simmer kept there

Like a hive on the hearth in a honeycomb color of cat

While nibbling the windows and gnawing raw rainspout toes

And flaking the rainbarrel frost there the smothering goes;

A funeral quell passes by in a pageant of lost

And cataracts windowpane eyes with a filming of frost

And sugars the dogs as they yellow-write sums in the snow—

Strange Orient alphabets sprinkled where smiling dogs go.

And the winter’s old bones fall apart in a shatter of white

And I bed with my bumblebee honeycomb cat for the night

And the sound of the snow grows in heart-murmur patterns yet dimmer

And the one thing I hear in deep sleep is the motor of cat:

What sound’s that?

Long-lost summer.

Oh, pantry Deeps’ miscellany

Bestirs boy’s victual villainy,