You’ll never know what you can do
Until you crack that sky of blue
And feel the dark space ‘wash of you
You’ll never, never know.
A spaceman’s life is hard indeed
Without there ever being need
For war with any alien breed
To give the spaceman woe.
A thousand years are but a day
Asleep aboard the “Cosmic Ray”
And so we snooze our years away
Such is the spaceman’s woe.
And if we die out in the deep
There’s none to wail and none to weep
Our bones are in dry space to keep
Oh hear our tale of woe.
Grady Louis McMurtry (1918 – 1985)
From “The Ballad of the Spaceman’s Woe”