When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. Ray Bradbury

trillion miles away.

      Ten light-years off.

      See! from your whale-shaped craft:

      That glorious planet!

      Call it Ararat.

When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed

      When elephants last in the dooryard bloomed

      Brought forth from dusts and airing attics where they roomed

      For many a year and faded out the roses on their flanks

      And sucked the dust and trod the ancient grass in ranks

      Beyond our seeing, deep in jungles on our parlor floor,

      These old familiar beasts we led into the light

      And beat upon their pelts and hung them in the sight of sun

      Which glorious made the panoplies of thread.

      What grandeur here!

      What pomp of Hannibal and Rome and Alps,

      Egyptian cerements and tombs, Troy’s ruins, Delphic glooms—

      Across such arabesques as these once walked Victoria.

      Now in the lost great animal boneyard these lively skins are stretched,

      Unravel, fall to pollen and to rust. Sic transit gloria.

      All this has passed, is dim as ill-recalled rococo

      But in my youth I stomped out cinnamons from these

      God-awful paths and raised up such a flour of scents

      As would reel down kings and make rise up to kingship

      Lunatic lepers and foul penitents.

      Old creatures, slung upon a wire in wind and light

      And years’ ebbtide

      I beat you gently with my howdah wire-racket beater,

      Search tigers in the shade of your deep hills

      And stand, a monarch made, along your blind impatient old

      And slumbrous side,

      And know that modern carpetings and rugs, so bland, so broad

      So nothing, and so shallow

      Were made for snails

      And men who breakfast, lunch, and dine

      Upon the safe, sure, ever-recurring marshmallow.

      Still somewhere in this world

      Do elephants graze yards?

      In far towns toward the East and North toward Michigan

      Do grandmothers and boys go forth to lawns,

      And lines strummed there ’twixt oak or elm and porch,

      And tie thereon great beasts of Indian grace

      Loomed taller than their heads?

      Still on such days do heartbeats throng the town

      Where elderwitch and tads,

      Where toms and great-grand-crones gone feverish with sweat

      Goad Time out of the warp and weave,

      The tapestry of treaded hearthwarm woolen flesh,

      Beat Time into the breeze and watch the billion footfalls

      Sift clouds into the greening insufferable beauty of young trees?

      Do old and young still tend a common ground?

      Vast panoply and firewalk spread of God’s most patient brute

      Whose firecoal eyes observe and well-worn hide

      Now feels the woman tire, so Boy takes up the beat:

      Where one thump dies, another heart begins.

      Along the cliff of dusty hide

      From either end, with centuries between as well as miles,

      Old looks to young, young looks to old

      And, pausing with their wands,

      Trade similar smiles.

Darwin, the Curious

      Old Curious Charlie

      He stood for hours

      Benumbed,

      Astonished,

      Amidst the flowers;

      Waiting for silence,

      Waiting for motions

      In seas of rye

      Or oceans of weeds—

      The stuff on which true astonishment feeds—

      And the weeds that fed and filled his silo

      With a country spread

      By the pound or kilo,

      Of miracles vast or microscopic,

      For them, by night, was he the topic?

      In conversations of rye and barley,

      Did they stand astonished

      By Curious Charlie?

Darwin, in the Fields

      Darwin, in the fields, stood still as time

      And waited for the world to now exhale and now

      Take in a breath of wind from off the yield and swell

      Of sea where fill the clouds with sighs;

      His eyes knew what they saw but took their time to tell

      This truth to him; he waited on their favor.

      His nose kept worlds far larger than a goodly nose might savor

      And waited for the proper place to fit the flavor in.

      So eye and nose and ear and hand told mouth

      What it must say;

      And after a while and many and many a day

      His mouth,

      So full of Nature’s gifts, it trembled to express,

      Began to move.

      No more a statue in the field,

      A honeybee come home to fill the comb,

      Here Darwin hies.

      Though to ordinary eyes it might appear he plods,

      Victorian statue in a misty lane;

      All that is lies. Listen to the gods:

      “The man flies, I tell you. The man flies!”

Darwin, Wandering Home at Dawn

      Darwin, wandering home at dawn,

      Met foxes trotting to their lairs,

      Their tattered litters following,

      The first light of the blood-red sun adrip

      Among their hairs.

      What must they’ve thought,

      The man of fox,

      The