and another thing...

i just stumbled across this poem by bradbury. with each thing i read i respect this man more and more...

A poem written on learning that Shakespeare

and Cervantes both died on the same day

by Ray Bradbury

Great Shakespeare lost, Cervantes gone

The sun at noon goes down. The dawn

Refuses light. Time holds its breath

At this coincidence of death

Then can it be? and is it so

That these twin gods to darkness go

All in a day! and none to stop

The harvesting of this fell crop

Each in its field, and each so bright

They, burning, hurled away the night.

Yet night returns to seize its due,

One Spirit Spout? No! Death takes two.

First one. The world goes wry from lack

Then two! tips world to balance back.

Two Comet strikes within a week,

First Spain, then dumbstruck England's cheek.

The world grinds mute in dreads and fears

Antarctica melts down to tears,

And Caesars ghosts erupted, rise

All bleeding Amazons from eyes,

An age has ended, yet must stay

As witness to a brutal day

When witless God left us alone

By deathing Will, then Spanish clone.

Who dares to try and gauge each pen

We shall not see such twins again.

Shakespeare is lost, Cervantes dead?

The conduits of God are bled

And gone the Light, and shut the clay

Two Titans gone within a day,

Two felled by one sure stroke of death,

Christ gapes his wounds. God stops his breath.

And we are staggered by twin falls

The vastness of the day appalls

As if a tribunal of Kings

From Caesars down to our Royal Things,

A pageant of rich royalty

Were drowned in Time's obscenity.

Who ordered thus: "Two giants - die."

First one and then our other eye

God shut the great, then greatest dream

One not enough? No, it would seem

A void half full if Shakespeare, done

Went down to doom at sunset's gun.

So then lamenting, then with laugh,

God seized and filled the other half.

Cervantes pulled across the sill

To heart of Comet brim and fill.

God sent both forth, twin stars whose fire

Birthed whales and beauteous beasts for hire

And long years since we beg for rides

Where Cervantes plus Shakespeare hides

Their fall? knocked echoes round the Stage

And still we reckon our outrage

Because where is the sense in this

Our left hand and our right we miss

Which clapped together made applause

For God and Primal Cosmic Cause.

But Cervantes and Bard strewn cold

Two wild Dreams in one dumb soil mold?

Let all the echoes flow in tides

Where comets are their flowering brides

And Cervantes and bawdy Will

Do windmill fight our hopes uphill

And rouse us up in nightmare bed

To cry: Quixote, Hamlet, dead?

In one fell day? Get off! Get. Go!

Such funerals I will not know.

Their graves, their stones, these I refuse.

Lend me their books, show me their Muse.

By end of day or, latest, week,

I bid Cervantes/Shakespeare speak

To brim my heart, to fill my head

With what? Good Don. Fine Lear. Not dead. Not dead!