I Certainly Can Imagine Blue Blazing Light (For Ray Bradbury On His 100th Birthday) Poem by Mary Angela Douglas

for Ray Bradbury on his 100th birthday


I certainly can imagine blue blazing light short circuiting out of his fingers at the typewriter

and Sistine instances, paragraphs of gold so that the sun on hold ready to make its next scheduled appearance fumes behind clouds


who is this Bradbury, anyhow bumbling among the blackberries

denizen of summer self crowned King, American Orpheus

and in the end casting green shadows into his ravines


our sanguine hero departs and breaks his heart on the stars for us


so that everything green apple delicious


is peremptorily won over so that they are now best buds.

the sun and ray, ray of the sun

coveting all summers forever so that what is told is vintage


even before old age with its fantastical fantastic ear trumpet

still held out for the gramaphonic rains ceaselessly silver or


melon ripe thumped oh stories you have


become forever the pink and green slices picnic dribbled or

winged from his dovecote and arcing rainbows altering

this river of dreams so that we can no longer distinguish


the streams from the seas the earth from the sky

or the allegiance we pledge torn in half because we cannot decide

which we love more


while we stand children on the banks of it astonishment's own


at this prodigious imagination flowering past us zone past hyacinth zone

and radioed in:

crackling dont just stand there, DO something


and we think to ourselves there is a tangle of berries

long forgotten let us tarry there and in the raspberry thickets

lay aside the selves we thought we were and old despairs and take


and take on the colours of everything chameleon bright


or the armor of light lit up like a thousand stained glass windows on Mars

all that you think or are or could be if you tried

maiden and dragon transposed or it's suddenly snowing


chaplets of the stars and me with my one ruby candle, candlestick reading him

calliope proud and whispered aloud to a chimeless midnight


or in the baked bread of the day we pose I and my soul

ribboned rosed and beaded flummery on flummery and slipping past us he goes

into our own parades so that we feel he's still with us, mist! and then it fades.


missing him, all we need do weeping mirages. adagios

is turn the next page his children of rust clutching our amulets

and we are on it in the zenith of the zinnias at autumn's cusp.


mary angela douglas 7 april 2020