Goodbye Twentieth Century

From death camps to space

It’s been a race

So much pain and so much gain

As we sought to find

A new way to frame

our future and our past

in a way that would last

beyond our foibles and our foolishness

and kiss goodbye all our ghoulishness

and leave behind those memories

Earthbound and earth-hugging

As if History itself had been

the victim of a mugging

and the only cure for Auschwitz

is the comedy of Space

Herr Hegel talked about Being

And said consciousness can be freeing

And about how in this modern age of ours

We all know that we’re free

So maybe the cure for what ailed us

In that century that often failed us

With death camp and gulag,

with wars that were global

Is to count on space flight

to make us more noble

What better way to escape

from all that depravity

Than by going up up and up

away from all that Gravity

’till memories of Hell just simply fall away

like the morning fog

on a late August day

Retreating in mid-morning

From the San Francisco Bay

– David Klein