What can I possibly say about Ray Bradbury that hasn’t already been said? The man was a visionary, a literary giant, and a storyteller for the ages. I’ve often told people that Ray Bradbury’s grocery lists probably read better than my poetry and prose.

In grade school I read The Illustrated Man, R is for Rocket and S is for Space. In high school, I read The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, and Something Wicked this Way Comes. As an adult, I’ve read through them all again plus all the other stories that I never got to when I was younger. It didn’t matter what genre Ray wrote in, he nailed it.

Around five years ago I bought a book called With Cat for Comfort, Ray’s tribute to the noble felines that many of us keep as not only pets but as part of our family. It was my first introduction to Ray’s poetry, and sent me off on a spree of reading any and all of his poetic work. That’s when I found this poem, including a video of him reading it to scientists at the JPL in 1972. This is the beauty of Ray Bradbury; taking science and making it human.

The fence we walked between the years
Did balance us serene
It was a place half in the sky where
In the green of leaf and promising of peach
We'd reach our hands to touch and almost touch the sky
If we could reach and touch, we said,
'Twould teach us, not to, never to, be dead

We ached and almost touched that stuff;
Our reach was never quite enough.
If only we had taller been
And touched God's cuff, His hem,
We would not have to go with them
Who've gone before,
Who, short as us, stood as they could stand
And hoped by stretching tall that they might keep their land
Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul.
But they, like us, were standing in a hole

O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall
Across the Void, across the Universe and all?
And, measured out with rocket fire,
At last put Adam's finger forth
As on the Sistine Ceiling,
And God's hand come down the other way
To measure man and find him Good
And Gift him with Forever's Day?
I work for that

Short man, Large dream
I send my rockets forth between my ears
Hoping an inch of Good is worth a pound of years
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal mall:
We've reached Alpha Centauri!
We're tall, O God, we're tall!