What Ray Might Say Today If He Came Back For His 100th Birthday Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

for Ray Bradbury on his 100th birthday and all those who love him and his stories...forever



to live in the beauty of the story as it is unfolding is granted to only some

to fix the moment like a star, like a red leaf falling

to remember the air crisp as apples

the shadow on the stair to recreate

the sudden shaft of sunlight through the emerald trees

the snow crowning everything the wilderness rains

I tried I tried to see and be this simultaneously

to freeze all the fragile disappearing

through a lens of rose or one of amber October shearing

not only to compose the music but to live within it

singing and singing

I am alive in all the cherry red dimensions

as far as the reach of white blue space

and heaven and earth besides

right now in the honeyed cornucopia of all my days and ways

and you are alive too. darling reader

darling and ever christened ever living reader

beyond the margins of all the stories that are

that were, that ever will be.

as far as the marigold eye can see.



mary angela douglas 22 august 2020