Sharing a Piece of Visionary Poetry

Proudly bearing a trophy to share with you, I returned home the other night from a meeting of the Friends of the Santa Ana Public Library. Ray Bradbury, the celebrated author of more than 400 science fiction works, had entrusted me with the trophy. “Just mail it back to me,” he had said, after giving me permission to publish it here for the first time.

It is, as you will see, a smallish poem attesting to an aspect of Bradbury’s character that had surprised me. It seems he is in the habit of writing verses when he is particularly moved by something. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, for he is a creative fellow brimful of an optimistic, curious, intellectually wide-ranging sensibility about the magnificent universe he has borrowed for his work. He is a laughing, weeping, vibrantly alive 65-year-old visionary, so I suppose I should have known he was a poet, among his other multifaceted talents.

The following poem, transcribed from his typescript, has no title. It was, he told us, inspired by a news item that had to do with scientists predicting that, with new gene-chromosome research, we soon may be able to repopulate the world with once-lost races of animals. The idea had delighted him. This poem furnishes insight into the way his mind works:

With recombinant DNA recall from dust,

The Beasts that once were ours to keep in trust,

Shape mammoth fresh and new as on that morn,

When all the flesh of ancient time was born.

Rebuild the pterodactyl, give him flight,

Erect tyrannosaurus in the night,

Wake brontosaur who dreams in tar pit deeps,

Go tiptoes where the eohippus sleeps.

Then with your recombinant DNA’s

Thrive slimes and muds where stegosaurus stays.

Be God. Provoke His Medicines. Cry “Light!”

And all the lost beasts, waked, raise up from night.

Ecologists, beware. These are our theses!

You doomsters now our prime endangered species.

“Whenever we read the newspapers, it’s pure science fiction, isn’t it?” Bradbury commented with relish. Nearly everything seems to be grist for Bradbury’s creative imagination. He adores public libraries, museums, art galleries, world fairs, Disneyland and hardware, book and stationery stores. In them repose the past, present and future. If he were to build a new city, he’d model it around these places.

These are the tremendously exciting places that change people’s minds and lives, he said. And he’s all for that. Change that fires imaginations causes people to “do something good, and then someone may imitate you,” he said.

At base, the kind of change he likes is that which stimulates “love of myriads of things.” This is the pattern of Bradbury’s life and career. He’s fascinated by archeology, biology, science in general, space and space ships, comic books (he collects them ardently), dinosaurs, magic and magicians, art and architecture, television, psychic phenomena, religions--the list is almost endless.

And, he confessed, his multiple loves and interests have led to many jobs. Some publisher or producer remembers “there’s that madman in Los Angeles” who knows something about a certain subject, and Bradbury is engaged to do some writing or planning about it.

This kind of thing happens only if you’re open to change, and “change only comes with loving things, involvement in things, creating examples,” he said.

He’s a great believer in “optimal behavior.” If you want to write or be a painter, then do it, he urged. Do it every day for at least an hour, and you’ll become what you wish to be.

And, he added, you don’t need money for an education. “You have the library. Use it!”

The public library was where Bradbury got his education. He couldn’t make it to college, so, he said, “I am a graduate of the Andrew Carnegie (library) system.”

As I left the Santa Ana City Hall Annex Auditorium with the poetic trophy in my pocket, I saw a poster on the wall announcing National Library Week (May 14-20). Harry Blackstone Jr., the magician, was pictured on it floating in the air, holding his new book on magic, “The Blackstone Book of Magic and Illusion.”

And guess what? Ray Bradbury wrote the introduction to the book, because he was remembered as that madman who loved magic and magicians, among his many, many other loves.

I instantly coveted that poster. The next day, I called the Santa Ana Library to ask if they’d give it to me. Alas, Bradbury had beaten me to it by taking it off the wall the night before.

Oh, well, I’ve got his poem.