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,