Goodbye Twentieth Century…a Poem
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