20150611 (space travel)

Artist's rendition of Burt Rutan's/ Virgin Atlantic Spaceship one--false image: mother ship below would not be visible; flames would long disappeared as they fire only shortly to put the ship on a straight up trajectory.

Before we knew anything about space

It was possible to dream of high-flown travel

We got away with going to the moon

Several times. Now except for romantics

And the uninformed no one seriously suggests

We go back. For the bewildered who’ve signed up

Or God forbid paid for one-way tickets 

To the Red Planet I pray before their feet

Rise to gain the capsule the scales fall

From their eyes and they demand a refund

Aside from the likely decay of weightless 

Muscle and the chance that undetected

Pinhole punctures to their ships or suits

Will drain their rebreathed oxygen hissed

Into the noiseless void unrecoverable

Once they break from earth’s gravity 

In a very short time they escape the protective 

Shadow of the planet’s magnetic field

And lay exposed to the sun’s unrelenting light

Fish in a barrel for unpredictable pulses

Solar flares Coronal Mass Ejections 

Of such power no physical barrier or low energy field

Would ward them away. Aside from disrupting

Electrical power radios computers those rads 

Would instantaneously corrupt practically 

All your DNA. With a wave of a wave 

You’re nuked to sizzle like a strip of bacon

Or just about everything that makes you you

Is set to a new course as many cancers

As one can conceive and many we cannot

I have not even mentioned Gamma Ray Bursts

Because if we ever get hit with one of those

It’s goodbye everyone even people

On the other side of the earth

So I’ll happily settle for sending machines

Where no man has gone before

Let them take pictures and broadcast back

A misnomer those beams are carefully aimed

The adventures recounted in the sci-fi pulps 

I bought at Pilch’s corner deli on Saturdays

When as an altar boy I served a wedding mass

And was tipped by the best man

I concealed in my shirt lest my mom see

The scantily clad space girls on the covers 

And raise a ruckus about my reading filth

That’s what you do with your mass money

Mom you don’t understand these are space stories

We’ll see about space when your father gets home

All the early NASA books lavish with glorious

Color of earth achievable no more. No more

Star travel. It took ten years and incredible

Computing for Rosetta-Philae to get beside 

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko to let

Philae land on that tumbling dumbbell of porous rock

If they’d asked me I wouldn’t have gone

That’s way too damn many National Geographics

To carry along for leisurely reading

I’m happy with Hubble APOD and Rovers on Mars

I have only to look up to know 

Where my next breath is coming from

Though I don’t rely anymore that I’ll always 

Get to take it








c. J.S.Manista, 2015