Where Robot Mice And Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns. Ray Bradbury
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!”
Ghost at the Window, Hive on the Hearth
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.
Boy Pope Behold! Dog Bishop See!
Oh, pantry Deeps’ miscellany
Bestirs boy’s victual villainy,
Unwaters mouth of innocence,
Unshucks the soul of reticence;
For in the deeps of snowbin sweets
And hung-banana jungle treats
We wandered as a jump-squirrel boy
To amble, maunder, ponder, toy
With jellies, jams and other pelf
From apple-cherry-berry shelf,
And read the names and wondered how
Clown doughnuts lay in such deep snow;
And took cosmetic chocolate-chips
To draw moustache on virgin lips.
And full of candied avarice
Blacked-out our teeth with licorice,
And grinned like devilled ham at self
Preserved in mirror-jars on shelf
And saw our eyes gone berry-blue
As all the jams this summer grew,
And bright our lips as cherry sins
And ripe our smile as pumpkin grins;
And full our mind of murder/slaughter
But clean our breath as menthol water
That in the dripped night, dark and still
The old dog laps from icebox sill.
Boy Pope behold! Dog Bishop see!
Twin celebrants in dark pantry
Where all the pontiff’s orbs are kept:
Crabapple multitudes, sweet slept.
Confessional the cubby seems
Where dog and boy feed naked dreams
And wash it all in innocence
From parsley/pickle/peppermints,
To in the half-lit wild of dawn
Uncoil in cartwheels on the lawn
And teach drab cats to catnip take
And Christian fasts call forth and break.
Then up the stairs the saved child creeps
And icebox-hid the sly dog sleeps
And none to know their midnight sins
Are stashed and slept in pantry bins.
And what the moral in this lies?
Stop boys. Leash dogs. Swat bugs. Squash flies.
Prohibit such from pantry reach,
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