Читать книгу The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope - Рэй Брэдбери, Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Philip K. Dick Isaac Asimov - Страница 12

This attic where the meadow greens

Now keeps itself a world between two worlds,

One world of weather, one of blood and dream.

Its architectural scheme there high above

Was to make heaps and sprawls of silent time

Abide it there to know a slower beat

Than any river street or dogprint lawn.

Here yawns lost yestermorn

When loss and death were yet unborn

And fear, locked in the womb, stopped up its breath

To let it whisper forth some other year.

A gardener lived here once—

My grandpapa whose notion

Was to tend and seed a rooftop sea of grass

And garret-mind it under glass—

A private lawn, each blade an hour, minute, second

Burning bright

Where boys and dogs might meet to fight, or gambol on,

And smile.

And all the while poor beasts below

In stifled traffics come and go.

So, late and drowned in night

Or striking midriff day,

The old man bent to rattletap croquet

And marched between the arching hoops

And found it clever to knock brightly colored balls

That comet-ran forever down our hidden sky.

In meadow-attic, with fanatic skill and ease

He touched to kill wrong destinies with games.

Full joys, fine aims he planned and played above the trees.

Death’s sneeze? was corked! And if dark came some future day

He would be challenged to delay awhile,

Take up croquet, seize mallet,

Stop balloting for night,

Stand bright, know day,

Whack blazing orb-sun, rolling fire,

Lose at croquet to Gramps,

The champ of champs who sent dark down and out away from town.

Toward other years and hours

When high lawn brown and sunk to seed knew weed for flowers.

The games went on till I was ten.

Death, back again, brought grimmer tools

And played Gramps by some older, stricter rules and won.

In mid-June’s bright-noon sun

The croquet stopped in full mid-scene.

We buried old man, mallets, orbs, and hoops in that high green.

That’s years ago.

We rarely visit now in attic meadows where you’d need a plow

To find his treasuring of bones

Or make a measuring of where the ancient joys

Still play themselves on air

For boys.

I only know on days like these

I hear his rushing run above the trees

Where his ghost tells me what life means

From attic where the meadow greens.