The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope
One of Ray Bradbury’s classic poetry collections, available in ebook for the first time.A poetry collection from a master of fantasy celebrates the familiar and unusual in verses dealing with subjects from Ty Cobb to dinosaurs and strawberry shortcake to the Vatican.It includes many of Bradbury's best verses, including «They Have Not Seen the Stars,» «This Attic Where the Meadow Greens,» «There Are No Ghosts in Catholic Spain,» «Farewell Summer,» «Once the Years Were Numerous and the Funerals Few,» "Doing Is Being, «We Are The Reliquaries of Lost Time,» and others.
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THE HAUNTED COMPUTER
AND THE ANDROID POPE
Ray Bradbury
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB
Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1981
Cover design by Mike Topping. Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014 Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007539918
Version: 2014–07–18
With love for my granddaughter, Julia, whose face promises me immortality
Table of Contents
The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope
Go Not with Ruins in Your Mind
Nor Is the Aim of Man to Stay Beneath a Stone
Joy Is the Grace We Say to God
This Attic Where the Meadow Greens
Shakespeare the Father, Freud the Son
A Miracle of Popes, All with One Face!
Once the Years Were Numerous and the Funerals Few
The Dogs of Mesopotamia—Dyed by Spring
And Yet the Burning Bush Has Voice
To an Early Morning Darning-Needle Dragonfly
Poem Written on a Train Just Leaving a Small Southern Town
There Are No Ghosts in Catholic Spain
I Am God’s Greatest Basking Hound
Ode to an Utterance by Norman Corwin, Who Punned the First Line, and Must Suffer the Rest
We Are the Reliquaries of Lost Time
Anybody Who Can Make Great Strawberry Shortcake Can’t Be All Bad
And Have You Seen God’s Birds Collide?
You Can’t Go Home Again, Not Even if You Stay There!
Of What is Past, or Passing, or to Come
Ode to Ty Cobb, Who Stole First Base from Second
Let Us Live But Safely, No Bright Flag Be Ours
Everyone’s Got to Be Somewhere
The Past Is the Only Dead Thing That Smells Sweet
Good Shakespeare’s Son, the Typing Ape
Haunted Computer, Android Pope,
One serves data, the other hope.
The late-night ghosts of man’s dire needs
Are snacks on which computer feeds
To harvest zeros, sum the sums,
Knock something wicked ere it comes,
And drop dumb evil to its knees
With inked electric snickersnees.
While Android Pope takes up from there,
Where physics stops mid-flight, mid-air,
There Papa’s primed electric mind
Grows faith in countries of the blind.
Where mass and gravity bulk huge—
Andromeda its centrifuge—
Or matter dwindles to mere flea,
There Android Pope makes papal tea
To serve to doubtful Thomas me
And thee and thine and thine and thee;
Last suppers his to circuit there
Where physics loses self in air,
And man surprised by large or small
Sees naught beyond the two at all.
That is the moment where, well-met,
Electric Pope/Computer fret
Where stuff gives up its ways and means
And emptiness fills in-betweens
Where label-less the mystery goes
In veils and prides of cosmic snows
Which rationed out by God beyond
Are light-year sea and lake and pond
Which shallow are but drowned in deeps’
Computer mind that finds and keeps
But cannot answer final thirst:
Which, egg or chicken, arrived first?
The primal motive hides in stars
Where astronauts in rocket cars
Will never solve it, so bright Pope
With fireworks inside for hope,
With tapes for tripes, A.C.-D.C.
Speaks metaphors from Galilee
And bakes good bread and serves a wine
That bloods the soul most super-fine
And emptiness fills up with words
Like flocking flights of firebirds
That move and motion, merge and mull
So men gone empty now are full.
Yet, all mysterious remains,
So man stands out in ghosting rains
And makes umbrellas with machines
Half-satisfied with in-betweens,
