Ray Bradbury and the Future

Posted on April 14, 2016 in Poems

You are not the future, Ray Bradbury told me, because you are not a scientist.
I was 19 years old, a liberal arts freshman at a small California college hidden on lists of the best colleges in the nation.

Which by definition made him not part either.
He wrote about the future with few clues about math or chemistry or physics
Just dreams about dinosaurs, spaceships, and Martian canals.

But the joke’s on you, Ray.
I am the future that was.
I’ve outlasted you.
And I don’t see time machines or rockets harvesting fusion material from the Sun.
The Martian canals proved to be capillaries in Percival Lowell’s eyes.
I am what became of the world that I helped make.
Too bad you aren’t here to see it.