Literary Video of the Day – Ray Bradbury reads a moving poem on the eve of NASA's 1971 Mars Mission.

In keeping with today's Bradbury theme, here's a pretty powerful video. Bradbury was a huge proponent of science and space travel, and throughout the years he attended numerous major space mission events. On the eve of November 12, 1971, the Mariner 9 mission was about to enter orbit around Mars, making it the first spacecraft to orbit another planet. A symposium was held at Caltech, in which writers Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury shared the stage with scientists Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray. Bradbury captivated the audience with his poem "If Only We Had Taller Been," giving an almost spiritual inflection to the mission. It's well worth a watch:

Here's the complete poem:

The fence we walked between the years
Did balance us serene
It was a place half in the sky where
In the green of leaf and promising of peach
We'd reach our hands to touch and almost touch the sky
If we could reach and touch, we said,
'Twould teach us, not to, never to, be dead

We ached and almost touched that stuff;
Our reach was never quite enough.
If only we had taller been
And touched God's cuff, His hem,
We would not have to go with them
Who've gone before,
Who, short as us, stood as they could stand
And hoped by stretching tall that they might keep their land
Their home, their hearth, their flesh and soul.
But they, like us, were standing in a hole

O, Thomas, will a Race one day stand really tall
Across the Void, across the Universe and all?
And, measured out with rocket fire,
At last put Adam's finger forth
As on the Sistine Ceiling,
And God's hand come down the other way
To measure man and find him Good
And Gift him with Forever's Day?
I work for that

Short man, Large dream
I send my rockets forth between my ears
Hoping an inch of Good is worth a pound of years
Aching to hear a voice cry back along the universal mall:
We've reached Alpha Centauri!
We're tall, O God, we're tall!