PARTICOLOURED TEARS WERE FALLING THROUGH THE EVENING BLIND

 To commemorate the death of Ray Bradbury nine years ago today I am reposting this elegy I wrote for him a little over a week after he died. He is my most cherished American writer, bar none. Author of such books as Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, and The Martian Chronicles and author of hundreds of truly luminescent and nostalgic short stories. There is no one else like him in the whole galaxy of writers in my opinion. God bless you, Ray Bradbury. Live Forever now in Heaven and in our hearts through every blessed word you wrote. Particoloured Tears Are Falling Through The Evening Blind

PARTICOLOURED TEARS ARE FALLING THROUGH THE EVENING, BLIND

[small prelude on the pianoforte, for Ray Bradbury, gone:

August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012]

oh all the rainbows have fallen into the earth, headfirst-

and "snow without Christmas" as he cried

has stunned his sometimed midnight’s

sunned chorales.

but even now-

when the first curled hand bell of grief is chimed, at times,

magnolia creamery of the long before,

you’re still in business

on the ivory keys of snow-coned

pages turning in the lock

or filtering round pure

apricot sparkles down

oh God knows how-

my shuttered April mind.

it’s wondering I dream to find

no new poet laureate of the homesick, but

distraught cloud horses whinnying on their own in

folds of cerulean, coral, forestalled-

with storied apples offered: oh wrought of a banished gold

(as they are now)-

to keep them home.

the day wears on. we won’t know clearly now

when dark ferrised earth kept turning into...

blossom ladened trees renew their snow

and petal the sweetheart mourning: morning

minstrelsy is dead throughout the vacant orchards but is she

pale pink surprised into carmine

by valentines received

in the afternoon mail

from one thought dead…?

while we as we behold through a looking glass

pinhole in the constellations:

his ice-cream coloured trollies

hauling back and forth

new circuses of sighs and working prisms-

(dewdrop, listen, he whispered so we

wouldn’t forget you ever-

or children would just let go and all at the same time,

their last balloons losing everything then:

(it felt that way, to them)

It’s got to be now on Opal Rails

somewhere else, going on.

couch this in bluebirds and hydrangeas

and cool cups of lilied moonlight on the grass

of other planets looking just like home

held higher above our heads than these dreams

have ever been before: long

past the vast pinwheeled parades of

the strolling musicians,

musicless on earth;

but not where motley is torn-

its falling its falling through the evening blind

and near our particoloured tears, unending

for the something unsurpassed

and all, all-in-all at last-

caught by a weeping God in a ruby red bottle-

the best firefly of the whole Summer-

mary angela douglas 14 june 2012 1:49 p.m.