Astronauts
(‘Challenger’: 28 January 1986)
Riding flaming columns
Into unknown space,
Monitoring instruments
Juddered by displaced
Huge kinetic pressures
Outwith your control;
Juggling with computer-data —
Utterly involved —
Until some sudden defect
Cancelled your bold try
With incandescent epigraph
Scrawled across the sky!.
Like mythic Icarus who flew
Too far, too high, too soon —
But brave ancestral pioneer
Of heroes then unborn
Who could achieve the mastery
Of fire and of force
To lead our brave humanity
From its primal crib
To some distant planet
Where posterity may live
When Earth no longer can sustain
Their exponential growth —
You rode those fatal columns
Into the unknown,
Searching a safe flightpath
To that future home.
