Neil Armstrong, RIP

I guess it’s time for that bio pic starring Kirk Lazarus…. 😀

I remember that night vividly, watching with my family, the magic of watching the greatest triumph of the human spirit I’d ever seen. Thinking back, what comes to my mind as I grieve the loss of Neil is this:

“High Flight”

(John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (9 June 1922 – 11 December 1941) was a 19 year old American aviator and poet who died as a result of a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire during World War II. He was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he voulunteered into before the United States officially entered the war. He wrote this a few months before he died, after having taken his Spitfire Mark 1, VZ-H, serial number AD-291, RCAF 412 Squadron, up to over 33,000 ft., which triggered the last line of the poem in his head. )

RIP, Johnny. I hope to break bread with you and Neil some day.
—————————————————————–

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

How long before some leftist academic besmirches his legacy ala colombus by saying he desecrated the moon or some such nonsense that passes for “groundbreaking scholarship” these days?