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.

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