Ray Bradbury - The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope

The champ of champs who sent dark down and out away from town.

Toward other years and hours

When high lawn brown and sunk to seed knew weed for flowers.

The games went on till I was ten.

Death, back again, brought grimmer tools

And played Gramps by some older, stricter rules and won.

In mid-June’s bright-noon sun

The croquet stopped in full mid-scene.

We buried old man, mallets, orbs, and hoops in that high green.

That’s years ago.

We rarely visit now in attic meadows where you’d need a plow

To find his treasuring of bones

Or make a measuring of where the ancient joys

Still play themselves on air

For boys.

I only know on days like these

I hear his rushing run above the trees

Where his ghost tells me what life means

From attic where the meadow greens.

Three elegies written on visiting the deserted rocket pads at Cape Canaveral

1

Abandon in Place .

No Further Maintenance Authorized .

Abandon. Turn away your face.

No more the mad high wanderings of thought

You once surmised. Let be!

Wipe out the stars. Put out the skies.

What lived as center to our souls

Now dies—so what ?—now dies.

What once as arrow to our thoughts

Which target-ran in blood-fast flow

No longer flies.

Cut off the stars. Slam shut the teeming skies.

Abandon in Place .

Burn out your eyes.

2

Where firebirds once

Now daubers caulk the seams;

Where firewings flew

To blueprint young men’s dreams,

Now warbler here and osprey weave their nests

From laces lost from off a spaceman’s tread.

The great hearthplace stands cold,

Its Phoenix dead.

No more from out the coals

Bright salamanders burn and gyre,

Only the bright beasts’ skins and restless bones bed here,

And lost the fire.

O, Phoenix, rub thy bones,

No more suspire!

Flint souls, strike mind against wild mind.

Return! Be born of spent desire.

Bright burn. Bright burn!

O mighty God’s voice, shorn,

Give shout next Easter morn. Be born!

(Our prayer calls you to life.)

Reborn of fire!

3

Abandon in Place .

So the sign says, so the words go.

The show is spent, the fire-walkers gone,

And gone the glow at dawn.

This day? No rockets rise like thunder.

The wonder still remains

In meadows where mound-dwellers not so long ago

Envied the birds, the untouched stars,

And let their touching envy grow.

Machineries stir here with falls of rust;

The lust for space still echoes

In the birds that circle lost in mourning cries

Repeating shouts of crowds long-spent

Whose aching shook the skies.

The sea moves down the shore

In wave on wave full-whispering,

No more. No more.

When will the harvesters return

To gather further wonders as a fuel

And let them burn?

How soon will all of Earth mob round, come here once more

To stop the night,

Put doubt away for good with rocket light?

O soon, O let that day be soon

When midnight blossoms with grand ships

As bright and high as noon.

Prepare the meadows, birds, and mounds,

Old ghosts of rocketmen, arise.

Fling up your ships, your souls, your flesh, your blood,

Your blinding dreams

To fill, refill, and fill again

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’s

Promised and re-promised

Skies.

(famous last words)

The famous one was there

Like a statue put out upon our loving green.

His wife was mean and talked a lot,

The air was hot with all her talking

Chalking out a line and running along

Her mindless song filled up our ears.

We looked at him. Our mouths were grim.

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