We Have Our Arts So We Don’t Die of Truth - Ray Bradbury (1920-2012)

Know only Real? Fall dead.
So Nietzsche said.
We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth.
The World is too much with us.
The Flood stays on beyond forty days,
The sheep that graze in yonder fields are wolves.
The clock that ticks inside your head is truly Time
And in the night will bury you.
The children warm in bed at dawn will leave
And take your heart and go to worlds you do not know.
All this being so
We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe
And beat out blood; accept the devil’s neighborhood,
And age and dark and cars that run us down,
And clown with Death’s-head in him
Or skull that wears Fool’s crown
And jingles blood-rust bells and rattles groans
To earthquake-settle attic bones late nights.
All this, this, this, all this—too much!
It cracks the heart!
And so? Find Art,
Seize brush. Take stance. Do fancy footwork. Dance.
Run race. Try poem. Write play.
Milton does more than drunk God can
To justify Man’s way toward Man.
And maundered Melville takes as task
To find the mask beneath the mask.
And homily by Emily D. shows dust-bin Man’s anomaly.
And Shakespeare poisons up Death’s dart
And of gravedigging hones an art.
And Poe divining tides of blood
Builds Ark of bone to sail the flood.
Death, then, is painful wisdom tooth;
With Art as forceps, pull that Truth,
And plumb the abyss where it was
Hid deep in dark and Time and Cause.
Though Monarch Worm devours our heart,
With Yorick’s mouth cry, “Thanks!” to Art.

Taken from Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

Source: zoopat

Photo: Ray Bradbury in Paris, 1984, Sophie Bassouls/Sygma-Corbis