(I am being a *complete* lit geek right now. I understand if you would like to skip, although I am looking for suggestions, down at the bottom.)

He's such a gentle writer. The unquiet dead rising from their graves, horror blooming across the dead red sands of Mars for fine revenge, marriage turned to hate and murder, madness, lies, betrayal, lost youth, death--

--and the prose is warm and patient, and will be there when you finish. He writes stories where there's a sense of each moment standing alone, waiting, leading to the next but not falling away before it. Most things I read I want to see what will happen. With Bradbury's stories I just want to see. It's something I hardly ever find outside poetry, and never as consistently as I do in his work.

I was working through Quicker Than The Eye--and smiling over Gray's Anatomy Bar and Grill, owned by Dorian, before I was even a page into *that* story--and getting that odd sorrow/delight combination over Melville and Poe and Wilde in "Last Rites", and rereading "Free Dirt", which holds the single sweetest promise of animate dead I have ever met.

(Around this point, practicality shoved its foot in the door, dictating a break for dinner.)

After dinner, sitting around watching candles, possibly due to that whole attempting-to-find-a-location thing we were doing earlier, I asked John "Would 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion' be a little odd to read at a wedding?"

And he told me that no, it would be *very* odd to read at a wedding.

I can see his point, although I really do think it's a very uplifting poem. (Mind you, I think my perspective has been skewing slightly on occasion when it comes to the wedding. Like when I was wondering how the funeral home a few blocks south would react to being asked if they would rent the space. I mean really, they're set up to handle large social groups, they understand the potential gravitas of social rituals, they're easily accessible, they're all on one floor--

--anyway.)

So I went and dug it up, so I could have more than just the lines

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

running through my head, and sat down and reread the poem.

And it's reminding me very much of another poem, by Sara Teasdale, "There will come Soft Rain". Which, incidentally, was featured in the Ray Bradbury short story "There Will Come Soft Rains", which bears the same relation to most post-apocalyptic settings as "Free Dirt" does to most zombie movies.

So.

I'm hunting for other poems, or song lyrics, or short stories, with that same kind of sense--not Bradbury's, but the one from the poems. The idea that man is gone, and will die, and the end of things will come; and yet the world will continue, and death may be the end of it but is really fundamentally not that important. Like rain on bank holidays.

Suggestions?