Who is to say,
we cannot break our bond with the earth,
that we are too strongly tethered?
Not I for one.
Nor stone age man who leaps to death in mimicry of the birds,
nor the prisoner who, in confinement,
looks to the sky,
framed with the walls wherein he lies,
and says to himself, or herself, nay, I cannot fly.
And could I fly, I would touch the earth again,
or else burn up in the stratosphere.
Nay, nor the wild fowl, who may traverse 100 miles at a stretch,
ere they return to the earth.
Nor ashes carried in the air and bourn away upon the trade winds.
Who would admit an eternal debt to the earth,
which by every step we repay?
Least of all them overcome with wonder,
at infinite depth, at scale, at cold beauty,
at the splendid simulacrum of the cosmos.
Who then would hold me back by a leg or an arm,
who would through envy deny a splendid assimilation with the vasty domains of the other,
for what word, what momentary vocalisation of the earthbound
can in all justice give it name?
But in good faith, commit my body to it,
and I shall move throughout the eternal regions,
and circle in infinite revelry.
Deny me not this wild vanity,
commit not my body to the earth,
and I shall not call you cur, who walks upon the earth,
and there for evermore is tethered.
