Рэй Дуглас Брэдбери – Where Robot Mice And Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns (страница 5)
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
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