"We have one collective hope: the Earth And yet,
uncounted people remain hopeless,
famine and calamity abound
Sufferers hurl themselves in
to the arms of war;
people kill and get killed in the name of
someone else's concept of God
Do we admit that our thoughts
& behaviors spring from a belief
that the world revolves around us?
Each fabricated conflict,
self-murdering bomb, bomb, vanished airplane,
every fictionalized dictator,
biased or partisan, and wayward son,
are part of the curtains of society's racial,
ethnic, religious, national,
and cultural conflicts,
and you find the human ego turning the
knobs and pulling the levers
When I track the orbits of asteroids,
comets, and planets,
each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet,
choreographed by the forces of gravity,
I see beyond the plight of humans
I see a universe ever-expanding,
with with it s galaxies embedded within
the ever-stretching
four-dimensional fabric fabric
fabric of space and time
However big our world is, our hearts,
our minds,
our outsize atlases,
the universe is even bigger
There are more stars in the universe than grains
of sand on the world's beaches,
more stars in the universe than seconds of time
that have passed since Earth formed,
more stars than words & sounds ever uttered
by all hu mans who have ever lived
The day we cease the
exploration of the cosmos
is the day we threaten the
continuing of our species
In that bleak world,
arms-bearing,
resource-hungry people & nations nations would be
prone to act on their low-contracted prejudices,
prejudices,
and would have seen the last gasp
of human enlightenment
Until the rise of a visionary new culture that once
again embraces the cosmic perspective;
a perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above nor below,
but within"