Part One / Deep and Beyond, a poetic space trilogy

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Imagination moves people forward.

Americans have always pushed hard to reach new horizons. It started with the settling of the West; and then with the challenging words of John F. Kennedy that took us into the frontiers of space.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” John F. Kennedy

In 1966 we saw the beginning of the TV series Star Trek , the exploratory adventures of the crew of the starship Enterprise. Do you remember their mission? to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no man has gone before.

It is perhaps these two events, more than anything else, that has sparked our imaginations concerning space travel. It made us wonder what could be out there. Since then we have probed our galaxy with exploratory satellites, put men on the moon and rovers on Mars. And soon, astronauts will be flying further into deep space. We can only imagine what they will find.

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Part One / Deep and Beyond, a space trilogy

After traveling millions of miles into deep space our astronaut is stricken with loneliness and begins to imagine.

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There is Dancing and Drinking and a Huge Disco Ball

My computer comes to life
engages me
with nonessential data,
methane has turned
Neptune blue.

I look out into space,
a blackboard
with tallies of chalk,
one golden star,
the Holy-of-Holies.

My computer seduces
with the voice of a woman,
reporting continues,
Alpha Centauri radiates dim
but exists to outlast
a white giant.

I can picture us
drinking Martinis,
then make calculations
with logic too awkward
for a rational number.

NOTE: An earlier version of this poem was first published by the online journal 1949

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Within My Mind There is a Romance

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