Photo: NASA (& the American Tax Payer – for all Mankind)
Listen to an older version of this poem here.
Crossfield
flew across the barrier
Then Shepard rocketed so high
And of Gagarin, and Kamarov before them–
What did they feel?
Not ‘why?’
Truly, there is no Earth membrane
We live on a gas-ensconced globe,
Separated from space by mere thickness
Rotating, revolving and processing
Barrelling in lock and roll
Circling a star–in turn racing…
Round the galaxy’s massive black hole
Itself shot out from the center
Venturing
By expansion thus far
All this violence in balance
Enormous–yet mutually constrained
Their motions playing out like ice skaters
In a gliding dance of refrain
. . .
Armstrong & Aldrin first walked on Earth’s moon
With Cernan & Schmidt, the last two
On the face of that satellite ’til next time
They did what billions dream to
And yet
We’re like fish in a fish bowl
Or children confined to a yard
The fishes unaware of the oceans!
The children of nations afar!
Until a day whence
A few more jump the fence—
Like a fish’s brief rise from the bowl—
To glimpse the extent
Of a small world we rent
To spy but a limited whole
At an old age, now a lonely Earth sage
We see the limits of home
. . .
There are trillions of planets
Round trillions of stars
Yet those nearby
We’ve but seen from afar
In our own system:
Six-hundred-ninety-two worlds
Five dwarf planets
Eight, some of us know
And four-hundred-sixty-two moons!
Places we should go!
Let’s visit far neighbors!
The Jovian skies!
With more than mere cameras!
With human naked eyes!
Like children and fishes
Pets chained to rocks
Moonshots
Are feral,
Though great
Humans—
Must Go
To the stars!
CA
CΔRL ΛTTΞNIΞSΞ: 