Kitabı oku: «The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope», sayfa 2

Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone

They say that we must falter, fail, and fall away

To all that’s lost;

I say the cost is overmuch

I’d spend us better with our will.

The mills of our machine-made gods grind swift not slow,

I with their lightning-arcs and wild illuminations go

To light a path

Not to the grave but walking on the air

On stairs of weather, cloud, and sky.

I would not doom us with those easy repetitions

Of old kettledrumming dooms

I heard from childhood on in dull, drab,

Ideas long since gone to incestuous

Intellectuals’ rooms …

Where they make litanies of night to scare their souls

And turn from birds and skies and stars

To imitate death moles or morbid beetles ticking death

Which if we let them would dig deep in time and keep

Our flesh in most inconsequent black holes.

That’s not my game,

Nor is the aim of man to stay beneath a stone.

To own the universe, our aim. And never die.

That’s mine, and yours, and yours, and yours,

To shame dumb death, leave Earth to dust, tread moon,

Vault Mars, and win the stars with flame …

Or know the reason why.

Joy Is the Grace We Say to God

Joy is the grace we say to God

For His gifts given.

It is the leavening of time,

It splits our bones with lightning,

Fills our marrow

With a harrowing of light

And seeds our blood with sun,

And thus we

Put out the night

And then

Put out the night.

Tears make an end of things;

So weep, yes, weep.

But joy says, after that, not done …

No, not by any means. Not done!

Take breath and shout it out!

That laugh, that cry which says: Begin again,

So all’s reborn, begun!

Now hear this, Eden’s child,

Remember in thy green Earth heaven,

All beauty-shod:

Joy is the grace we say to God.

They Have Not Seen the Stars

They have not seen the stars,

Not one, not one

Of all the creatures on this world

In all the ages since the sands first touched the wind

Not one, not one,

No beast of all the beasts has stood

On meadowland or plain or hill

And known the thrill of looking at those fires;

Our soul admires what they, oh, they, have never known.

Five billion years have flown in turnings of the spheres

But not once in all those years

Has lion, dog, or bird that sweeps the air

Looked there, oh, look. Looked there, ah God, the stars;

Oh, look, look there!

It is as if all time had never been,

Or universe or sun or moon or simple morning light.

Their tragedy was mute and blind, and so remains. Our sight?

Yes, ours? To know now what we are.

But think of it, then choose—now, which?

Born to raw Earth, inhabiting a scene

And all of it, no sooner viewed, erased, gone blind

As if these miracles had never been.

Vast circlings of sounding light, of fire and frost,

And all so quickly seen then quickly lost?

Or us, in fragile flesh, with God’s new eyes

That lift and comprehend and search the skies?

We watch the seasons drifting in the lunar tide

And know the years, remembering what’s died.

Oh, yes, perhaps some birds some nights

Have felt Orion rise and tuned their flights

And turned southward

Because star-charts were printed in their sweet genetic dreams—

Or so it seems.

But, see? But really see and know?

And, knowing, want to touch those fires,

To grow until the mighty brow of man Lamarckian-tall

Knocks earthquakes, striking moon,

Then Mars, then Saturn’s rings;

And, growing, hope to show

All other beasts just how

To fly with dreams instead of ancient wings.

So, think on this: we’re first! the only ones

Whom God has honored with his rise of suns.

For us as gifts Aldebaran, Centauri, homestead Mars.

Wake up, God says. Look there. Go fetch.

The stars. Oh, Lord, much thanks. The stars!

This Attic Where the Meadow Greens

This attic where the meadow greens

Now keeps itself a world between two worlds,

One world of weather, one of blood and dream.

Its architectural scheme there high above

Was to make heaps and sprawls of silent time

Abide it there to know a slower beat

Than any river street or dogprint lawn.

Here yawns lost yestermorn

When loss and death were yet unborn

And fear, locked in the womb, stopped up its breath

To let it whisper forth some other year.

A gardener lived here once—

My grandpapa whose notion

Was to tend and seed a rooftop sea of grass

And garret-mind it under glass—

A private lawn, each blade an hour, minute, second

Burning bright

Where boys and dogs might meet to fight, or gambol on,

And smile.

And all the while poor beasts below

In stifled traffics come and go.

So, late and drowned in night

Or striking midriff day,

The old man bent to rattletap croquet

And marched between the arching hoops

And found it clever to knock brightly colored balls

That comet-ran forever down our hidden sky.

In meadow-attic, with fanatic skill and ease

He touched to kill wrong destinies with games.

Full joys, fine aims he planned and played above the trees.

Death’s sneeze? was corked! And if dark came some future day

He would be challenged to delay awhile,

Take up croquet, seize mallet,

Stop balloting for night,

Stand bright, know day,

Whack blazing orb-sun, rolling fire,

Lose at croquet to Gramps,

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.

Abandon in Place

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.

The Great Man Speaks

(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.

We waited. Speak!

Not a squeak, not a spark.

Hark, we muttered. What was that he said?

Dead, he might have whispered, my tongue is dead.

The wife’s afoot, oh hear her tell

Nine ways to heaven, ten to hell.

I cleared my throat, I leaned and waved at him.

By now his mouth was grim.

It was Christmas time, the tree was bright,

We wished his words to fire our night.

The wife raved on about crochets,

Ten endless days passed in that hour.

Our mouths, our breaths were sour.

The famous man was mute. I counted the drinks he had taken.

His wife, unshaken, unnoticing, burned libraries with a shrug.

Our souls oozed out on the rug.

The moon closed down with fog.

The bored dog snoozed.

We boozed and waited.

The wife, elated, thinking we heard,

Let go ten other stories, all absurd.

Then midnight came. At the door

The great man stood. What we had waited for

Was on his tongue, in his mouth, in his eyes.

Some brilliant quote, a grand surprise.

We waited. We listened.

His tongue moved. His eyes glistened.

He took a deep breath.

We were still as death.

Speak, we thought, oh great man

With your bright abacus—sum!

The wife, ah god, at last, was mum.

The great man chose his words carefully,

Shot them from cover, like quail in flight.

What were they, at last, at last?

Shutting the door and gone:

Good night.

Good night.