Our truth is painted across the sky
In our reflection we learn to fly
No hand to hold us
No one to save us from tomorrow
Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of everyone
No light to follow
A shot in the dark
Does anybody know?
Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of everyone
High from the heavens
I can't see the pain
Does anybody care?
Think for a moment of all the lives
Stripped of their essence before their time
We stand to conquer
But is there nothing left tomorrow?
Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of everyone
No light to follow
A shot in the dark
Does anybody know?
Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of everyone
High from the heavens
I can't see the pain
Does anybody care?
[Neil deGrasse Tyson]
We have one collective hope: the Earth
And yet, uncounted people remain hopeless, famine and calamity abound
Sufferers curl themselves into 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, 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 its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching four-dimensional 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 humans 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
Would be prone to act on their low-contracted 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