Janet Kuypers
3/23/19
After jumping out of an airplane
and watching the Tetons from above,
I wanted John, the man I love,
who was born on March 23rd,
to feel this feeling, like you’re
fighting the atmosphere in free fall.
It’s like no other feeling in the world.
Then I thought of another man,
also born on March 23rd, who
had dreams of breaking past
that atmosphere altogether,
and in his time, the only way he
could do that was to build rockets
for the SS, and dream of the moon.
It’s strange to believe that
Wernher von Braun was a rocket
engineer in Berlin during the
turbulent ’30s and ’40s, so he
became a part of the SS, and was
the head of Hitler’s dream plan
to build the perfect vengeance rocket.
And from what I hear, von Braun
did the work for Nazi Germany,
but he also loftily talked about
sending a rocket to the moon.
‘Don’t go around talking like that,’
I’m sure they’d say to him, so he
dreamed until the Nazi collapse.
So the States swooped him up
in the budding Cold War, and
von Braun even met with
President Kennedy to cement
their dreams, and then worked
on the Saturn V rocket, & Apollo
manned missions to the moon.
And okay, maybe I only jumped
from an airplane, maybe John
is fighting gravity in a wind tunnel,
and that’s no landing in the moon.
But cut us some slack, Wernher
von Braun didn’t get to the moon —
but this one man, born on March 23rd,
helped get us all where we are today.
|