The Soap Opera was created by Dallas Wheatley. If you liked what you heard, please rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, or tell your friends and family about it! Spreading the word makes all the difference.
Many thanks to Kevin MacLeod at incompetech.com for the music (Licensed under Creative Commons 4.0). The tracks used in this episode are "Ripples", "Overheat", "River Flute", and "Finding Movement".
Performers
Thought and Space
By Ray Bradbury
Performed by DJ Sylvis
Space—thy boundaries are
Time and time alone.
No earth-born rocket,
seedling skyward sown,
Will ever reach your cold,
infinite end,
This power is not Man's to
build or send.
Great deities laugh down,
venting their mirth,
At struggling bipeds on
a cloud-wrapped Earth,
Chained solid on a war-swept,
waning globe,
For FATE, who witnesses,
to pry and probe.
BUT LIST! One weapon have
I stronger yet!
Prepare Infinity! And
Gods regret!
Thought, quick as light,
shall pierce the veil,
To reach the lost beginnings
Holy Grail.
Across the sullen void on
soundless trail,
Where new spawned suns and
chilling planets wail,
One thought shall travel
midst the gods' playthings,
Past cindered globes where
choking flame still sings.
No wall of force yet have ye
firmly wrought,
That chains the supreme
strength of purest thought.
Unleashed, without a body's
slacking hold,
Thought leaves the ancient
Earth behind to mold.
And when the galaxies have
heeded DEATH,
And welcomed lastly SPACE'S
poisoned breath,
Still shall thought travel
as an arrow flown.
SPACE—thy boundaries are
TIME——AND TIME ALONE!
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost
Performed by Tal Minear
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Birches
By Robert Frost
Performed by Tal Minear
When I see birches bend left to right
Across the line of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust –
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for so long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows –
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where’ it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
