When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Ray Bradbury’s first ever poetry collection, available in ebook for the first time.Carried into strange and enticing realms by his fantastic stories, the multitudes of his admirers have never doubted that the author of Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles, and other uniquely imaginative works of short and long fiction is a poet. But, even so, the intensity of feeling, the imaginative range, the variety of subject and style in this, Ray Bradbury’s first collection of poems, amaze.In ‘Remembrance’, the poet experiences a piercing gratitude when he roots out of a squirrel’s hole a long-forgotten message addressed, when he was twelve, to his later self. In ‘Old Mars, Then Be a Hearth to Us,’ the master of science fiction carries us closer to that glowing planet. In ‘Emily Dickinson, Where Are You? Herman Melville Called Your Name Last Night in His Sleep!’ the literary fantasist delights us with his romantic imagination. Lose yourself in the delights of science fiction’s master storyteller.
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WHEN ELEPHANTS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED
Ray Bradbury
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB
Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1954, 1957, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Ebook Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780007539932
Version: 2014–07–18
THIS ONE TO THE MEMORY OF
my grandmother Minnie Davis Bradbury and my grandfather Samuel Hinkston Bradbury, and my brother Samuel and my sister Elizabeth Jane, long lost in the years but now remembered.
Table of Contents
Pretend at Being Blind, Which Calls Truth Near
The Boys Across the Street Are Driving My Young Daughter Mad
Old Ahab’s Friend, and Friend to Noah, Speaks His Piece
When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed
Darwin, Wandering Home at Dawn
Telling Where the Sweet Gums Are
Emily Dickinson, Where Are You? Herman Melville Called Your Name Last Night in His Sleep!
O Give a Fig for Newton, Praise for Him!
Women Know Themselves; All Men Wonder
All Flesh Is One; What Matter Scores?
Christ, Old Student in a New School
If You Will Wait Just Long Enough, All Goes
Old Mars, Then Be a Hearth to Us
The Thing That Goes By Night: The Self That Lazes Sun
A Train Station Sign Viewed from an Ancient Locomotive Passing Through Long after Midnight
Please to Remember the Fifth of November: A Birthday Poem for Susan Marguerite
That Is Our Eden’s Spring, Once Promised
God Is a Child; Put Toys in the Tomb
These Unsparked Flints, These Uncut Gravestone Brides
What Seems a Balm Is Salt to Ancient Wounds
To Prove That Cowards Do Speak Best and True and Well
And this is where we went, I thought,
Now here, now there, upon the grass
Some forty years ago.
I had returned and walked along the streets
And saw the house where I was born
And grown and had my endless days.
The days being short now, simply I had come
To gaze and look and stare upon
The thought of that once endless maze of afternoons.
But most of all I wished to find the places where I ran
As dogs do run before or after boys,
The paths put down by Indians or brothers wise and swift
Pretending at a tribe.
I came to the ravine.
I half slid down the path
A man with graying hair but seeming supple thoughts
And saw the place was empty.
Fools! I thought. O, boys of this new year,
Why don’t you know the Abyss waits you here?
Ravines are special fine and lovely green
And secretive and wandering with apes and thugs
And bandit bees that steal from flowers to give to trees.
Caves echo here and creeks for wading after loot:
A water-strider, crayfish, precious stone
Or long-lost rubber boot—
It is a natural treasure-house, so why the silent place?
What’s happened to our boys they now no longer race
And stand them still to contemplate Christ’s handiwork:
His clear blood bled in syrups from the lovely wounded trees?
Why only bees and blackbird winds and bending grass?
