Ray Bradbury's Poem Inspired by the Exploration of Mars

In May of 1971, NASA launched Mariner 9 to take picture of the planet Mars. Just prior to Mariner 9 coming into Mars' orbit, Bruce Murray hosted a public lecture and discussion at Caltech that featured a panel of authors and scientists, including Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, and Walter Sullivan. These lectures were later turned into a book of essays entitled "Mars and the Mind of Man".

Ray Bradbury's contribution to this panel was a short poem entitled "If Only We Had Taller Been". It is poignant and haunting, linking, as blogger Jurgen Wolff puts it, the dream of conquering space with that of immortality. The words of Bradbury's poem are printed below.

If Only We Had Taller Been

The fence we walked between the years
Did bounce 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 tall 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 Sistene 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!

Recently Brain Pickings posted a YouTube video of Bradbury reading the poem. Hearing it read by Bradbury is goosebump worthy.

Update

Last night I was listening to a podcast that was reviewing several papers and presentations from the 2015 IEEE conference on visualization, and one of the papers mentioned was related to examining the sonic topology of a poem. The authors have made their software, called Poemage, for this examination freely available. There is also a paper available here.

Anyhow, I decided to examine Bradbury's poem. Pretty pictures, although I don't know if I fully understand them. The colors have to do with the sounds, rhyming, etc. I may need to re-listen to see if the aural experience conforms to the model proposed below.