3rd MILLENIUM - OLDER GENERATION

I cannot end this series on Romanian Astronautic Poetry without
remembering about a significant event at the beginning of the 3rd millennium:
the 2003 poetic tribute of the
Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy-SARM
(17 poems by 16 authors)
dedicated to the regretted astronauts of the Columbia space shuttle,
which followed an initiative of American poet Larry Jaffe.
That tribute was initially published in Southern California Poetix,
and after that transferred into The Best of SARM - Astro-Photo-Art-Poetry.
And I am also in debt to complete the creations by the best SARM astropoets
from the previous issue of this series with remarkable quotations
on the same theme
by other pillars of Romanian astropoetry movement
(in my English translation too).
So I shall continue with the older generation (over 60 years).

Thus, as

…man will permanently look for
long distances and light years among the stars;
it will never be enough!
(Arnold Leinweber, 1920-2006),

we could find about the first inter-stellar flight:

I have decided in my mind to go for a trip
to Proxima, the closest star.
In fact, three stars are there!
Good for me,
I’ll visit all of them.
(What a performance will be!)
If I use a very fast airplane
(supposing it would be able
to fly through the void),
I would need a time short enough
for this situation:
about 4,600,000 years.
(What a insignificant duration!)
But, using a space shuttle,
I could save a lot of time:
I could touch Proxima Centauri
after only 120,000 years!
(What a great economy!)
And, after all those calculated years,
perhaps I’ll visit other stars.
I’ll be thinking of that, my dears…
(Zigmund Tauberg)

Or about another kind of flight:

Sweetheart, I have a proposal.
Let’s escape from our planet
to a traveling photon.
We would become sub-trifling there,
and we would lost depth, highness, surface,
but our love would be more profound.
Even if we would remote from the sun,
we would live in a second
eternities of flashing lives.
Our love would last in posthumous worlds,
and would promote (it’s not a sophism!)
another universal tourism.
(Florian Saioc)

Or even about a Christian ideal flight:

We shall fly in parallel with Don Quixote,
Sharing the Universe with him,
And our spaceship with its vast wings
Will seem to be a Cross…
(Constantin Dumitrescu-Cunctator,
a Romanian hero born in 1913,
who was a political prisoner for 40 years under the communist regime,
and after that a Romanian parliamentary;
this is a quotation from his long poem “Peace Comedy”,
chapter “Flight in the Cosmos”)

And we could also return to another sensible introspection:

I daily worked on that spaceship,
which in the past was a wreck
fallen from the Cosmos, from the Milky Way,
as angels fall into women.
Thus, my youth passed.
“We heard you built something smaller and simpler,
but… will it fly?”,
people asked me.
When it was ready, they were amazed:
my ship didn’t have wheels,
wings, motor, or sight -
it was just a ship for my interior flight.
(Boris Marian)