A Tribute to the Father of Science Fiction

Ray Bradbury changed the world. With words. Changed and opened lives, minds, futures. With words. Poet Russell Salamon offers this beautiful tribute to the man who was a father to a 

host of readers, writers, and deep thinkers.

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Ray Bradbury, High school photo

Unfinished Eternity

by Russell Salamon

In memoriam: Ray Bradbury

The body wore out working

the mind until the very last moment,

and the pieces of future lie strewn

on the workshop floor. Oh, those lovers,

those children of light, the star children

headed for Mars, those imaginations

fired up by Ray Bradbury, Ron Hubbard,

Robert Heinlein, those smoke filled

volcanoes cooking molten starfire--

something is different now that the

minds have printed their footsteps

in the path.

The unfinished eternity has picked

up blueprints and the planets wait;

winds of space wait for a fleet of minds

launched from books, visions wait

for the exodus. The future is planted,

minds blossom in the pull of moonlight.

We run after you, bodies still breathing

your sentences.

People who know, love your open

eyes which see into early nowhere

of new time, the soft gleam of nothing

under moonlight falling on dreams,

the sea currents rippling on our skins

with senses of saplings and grass winds

and smoke rising from a chimney where

you thought and spoke and visioned,

and envisioned, and saw again the

hands of Mankind opening to take

your senses into their senses

of light, reading the million colors

of a free mind like dense musics

of wet seacoasts. You left a dense

free land for the occupying forces

of love and life.

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Poem, copyright Russell Salamon, all rights reserved.

A prolific poet, Russell Salamon is the author of eleven books of poetry. His work has appeared in Passager, Sunstone, Uncommon Ground, Daybreak, The Listening Eye, Saint Petersburg Russian-American Anthology, Peckerwood, Puckerbrush Review, Retooling for the Renaissance in the Third Millenium, Riverside Quarterly, Trace, and Dare, among others. He serves on the editorial board for California Quarterly, published by the California State Poetry Society. He has been a featured reader at many venues in California and New York, with one reading in London. In California: Moonday, Beyond Baroque, Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Mission Viejo Public Library, Laguna Poets, Bakersfield Art Gallery, San Louis Obispo, Riverside, Mission San Louis Rey, Moondog, among others.