The Americans were so jubilant
when they launched a man
into the reaches of space,
and splashed it on TV screens.
A triumph of civilisation.
The rhetoric of progress.
Thank god for the good old US of A.
Really?
Alan Shepard floated just on
the top of the stratosphere,
circling around this oval rock,
and he looked down
and saw the oval in its course.
And the Americans thought they were so grand,
and must be evolving into the species of promise
that would, one day, move out into the galaxy.
There was a reckless optimism.
For we are all but a speck here in this infinity.
Shepard must have seen that.
But did he see
this planet is covered
with the unrelenting growth
of human misery?
Even in America, at the time,
civil rights was a battle ground;
and the poor got no benefit
from the space race;
and women were just
women in their place.
And they all watched
the TV screens,
looking through shop windows
into the blackness of space.
And, if the truth be told,
the Americans did it to outdo the members of
the human race that they labelled as enemy,
just because they were not the first, like Yuri Gagarin,
and just because they feared the reds and the bomb,
in this cryptic battle of Us vs Them..
And what now,
in the passing of this time
to the annals of history,
have we learnt?
Where are we in space?
Where are we on earth?
Where are we as a species?
Are we not as tribal and territorial
as when we wandered out of Africa,
and sought to dominate with our tools
and our gods?
18/2/2017