The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope - Ray Bradbury

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      Stay home.

      Stay home!

      I’ve seen a thousand homes go down the tracks

      Away, away …

      Late night or early morn,

      There goes the house, all white, where I was born.

      My traveling train

      Gives back to me by moon or noontime’s rain

      The house, the house, the house

      Where I’m reborn again.

      As common as sparrows in flight,

      There flies by my front porch and me,

      Out of sight, out of sight.

      We are common together: common house, common weather,

      Common boy on a bike on a cool dark night lawn,

      Sinking in clover,

      Or boy on brick street at dawn, roofing a ball:

      Annie over! Annie over!

      Where I’ll pop up next, Peoria or Paducah, I don’t know;

      All I can say is:

      Here I come, here I come,

      There I go, there I go!

      Always the same boy, bright-eyed as a mouse,

      Always the same folks on the porch of that house,

      Swinging by in the light,

      Drowning deep in the night,

      There they drift, there they fly

      At the train whistle’s cry:

      O good-bye, O good-bye.

      Lawn and porch on the run; boy’s face like the sun

      Looking up through the rain

      As again and again, the boy who was me

      Climbs a branch, drops from tree,

      But arrives to depart

      While his shout cracks my heart.

      Lord, does anyone see

      All those boys who are me,

      And does anyone know all those homes white as snow

      That like riverboats glide

      In the tide of the train as it takes me away?

      Who can say, who can say?

      Just my time machine moves

      Through the land of my loves,

      And more houses and boys and more trees and more lawns

      Wait there just ahead in the circling dawns.

      A procession of dreams!

      O, isn’t God clever?

      He’s cloned me in teams.

      So? I’ll live here forever!

      They say that we must falter, fail, and fall away

      To all that’s lost;

      I say the cost is overmuch

      I’d spend us better with our will.

      The mills of our machine-made gods grind swift not slow,

      I with their lightning-arcs and wild illuminations go

      To light a path

      Not to the grave but walking on the air

      On stairs of weather, cloud, and sky.

      I would not doom us with those easy repetitions

      Of old kettledrumming dooms

      I heard from childhood on in dull, drab,

      Ideas long since gone to incestuous

      Intellectuals’ rooms …

      Where they make litanies of night to scare their souls

      And turn from birds and skies and stars

      To imitate death moles or morbid beetles ticking death

      Which if we let them would dig deep in time and keep

      Our flesh in most inconsequent black holes.

      That’s not my game,

      Nor is the aim of man to stay beneath a stone.

      To own the universe, our aim. And never die.

      That’s mine, and yours, and yours, and yours,

      To shame dumb death, leave Earth to dust, tread moon,

      Vault Mars, and win the stars with flame …

      Or know the reason why.

      Joy is the grace we say to God

      For His gifts given.

      It is the leavening of time,

      It splits our bones with lightning,

      Fills our marrow

      With a harrowing of light

      And seeds our blood with sun,

      And thus we

      Put out the night

      And then

      Put out the night.

      Tears make an end of things;

      So weep, yes, weep.

      But joy says, after that, not done …

      No, not by any means. Not done!

      Take breath and shout it out!

      That laugh, that cry which says: Begin again,

      So all’s reborn, begun!

      Now hear this, Eden’s child,

      Remember in thy green Earth heaven,

      All beauty-shod:

      Joy is the grace we say to God.

      They have not seen the stars,

      Not one, not one

      Of all the creatures on this world

      In all the ages since the sands first touched the wind

      Not one, not one,

      No beast of all the beasts has stood

      On meadowland or plain or hill

      And known the thrill of looking at those fires;

      Our soul admires what they, oh, they, have never known.

      Five billion years have flown in turnings of the spheres

      But not once in all those years

      Has lion, dog, or bird that sweeps the air

      Looked there, oh, look. Looked there, ah God, the stars;

      Oh,

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