Casting Nets
Blues 'slip the surly bonds of earth'
Chuck Randle

With the recent launching of Discovery, and the Blue Angel show this weekend, we have been and will be treated to some most exciting events.

I often wonder what it is that causes us to feel a sense of awe when we see a launch or simply see a plane making its way across our skies. My 4-yearold great grandson enjoys going to the Naval Air Museum. He climbs into all the stripped down planes on the second floor, touches all the buttons and knobs, and imagines himself flying through the skies. There is certainly something exciting about "slipping the surly bonds of earth." Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee wrote of that excitement in his poem "High Flight."

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 windswept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew -

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untresspassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

I, along with thousands of others, have a great deal of pride in those astronauts, and the pilots of the precision team, the Blue Angels - as well as envy. As the Blues treat us to an outstanding show this weekend, and as Discovery returns to earth soon, I'll be thinking of this poem "High Flight" and those who "Put out (their) hand and touch the face of God."