28 July 2024

Joys.


GO NOT WITH RUINS IN YOUR MIND

Go not with ruins in your mind
Or beauty fails; Rome's sun is blind
And catacomb your cold hotel!
Where should-be heavens could-be hell.
Beware the temblors and the flood
That time hides fast in tourist's blood
And shambles forth from hidden home
At sight of lost-in-ruins Rome.
Think on your joyless blood, take care,
Rome's scattered bricks and bones lie there
In every chromosome and gene
Lie all that was, or might have been.
All architectural tombs and thrones
Are tossed to ruin in your bones.
Time earthquakes there all life that grows
And all your future darkness knows,
Take not these inner ruins to Rome,
A sad man wisely stays at home;
For if your melancholy goes
Where all is lost, then your loss grows
And all the dark that self employs
Will teem —so travel then with joys.
Or else in ruins consummate
A death that waited long and late,
And all the burning towns of blood
Will shake and fall from sane and good,
And you with ruined sight will see
A lost and ruined Rome. And thee?
Cracked statue mended by noon's light
Yet innerscaped with soul's midnight.
So go not traveling with mood
Or lack of sunlight in your blood,
Such traveling has double cost,
When you and empire both are lost.
When your mind storm-drains catacomb,
And all seems graveyard rock in Rome—
Tourist, go not.
Stay home.
Stay home!

Ray Bradbury

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