Mankind

My Poem “Apollo XI”

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Fifty years ago today,
a man took one small step,
one giant leap for all mankind,
and imprinted the first footprints
of exploration of The Moon,
while capturing the attention
of every nation of planet Earth
and inspiring the imagination
of an entire generation.

The 20th of July, 1969,
was the tip of an arrow,
the culmination of an idea,
the realization of a dream,
the answer to a call to rise above
our human divisiveness
and bring people together
to achieve something truly astounding
and incredible by working together
for a common purpose
to give humanity a vision
of a prosperous future
in which everybody could live
in peace with one another.

Fifty years ago,
three astronauts of NASA,
three men of planet Earth,
three space adventurers,
three space explorers,
three dreamers escaped this planet’s
gravity and journeyed across
the expanse of space
and arrived in orbit of The Moon…
fifty years ago, Michael Collins,
Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong
did what nobody before them
had ever done before,
and with the entire world watching
them intently, and yet from afar,
they redefined who we are,
who we should be,
what we should be doing,
and what we should never stop striving for.

The human race is at its best
when we are all thinking
about what is best for everybody,
when we are reaching for the stars
and believing that things
can and will get better for all
if we all choose to be
who we were born to be:
a people with a shared destiny
who need one another to
live to our full potential,
so that the next generations
can one day look back
and think well upon the choices
that were made to realize
the never-ending dream
of imagination, ingenuity,
and interstellar enlightenment
beyond those first imagined
by the dreamers, the scientists,
the engineers, the families,
and the astronauts
that breathed life into the missions
to put the first men on The Moon –
which came to fruition
with the success of Apollo 11,
when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
made history when they walked on The Moon
and then triumphantly returned to Earth.

My Poem ‘The Confidence of Man’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Everything needs a centre;
everyone needs a soul;
every world revolves around
a deep and distant light
that calls towards
what lies at their core;
everything in life
plays its essential role.

Having faith and holding-on to faith,
especially in people,
can be testing sometimes
on so many levels;
even God once questioned his own actions
in creating humanity,
according to Genesis in The Bible,
and sort to start anew
with a world-wide flood
after he was disappointed
that Adam and Eve disobeyed him
and listened instead to the words
of a serpent devil.

The entire history of Earth,
and the history of the human race,
is filled with tests of character,
spirit, and heart;
since the beginning of time,
life and light,
the entire universe has been a balance
of the Alpha and the Omega –
the first and the last;
even if your first attempt at something
is a failure and it does not resemble
the original blue-print that you had in mind,
it does not mean that the next time you try
to capture the lightning of an idea again
and bring it to life
it will not be better than you imagined,
and perhaps was always meant
to have not worked out the first time around
because it needed an additional surge
of energy and determination
so as to give it a new lease of life.

There is no such thing as failure,
there are only stepping stones
to the other side of a river;
there is no such thing as the wrong way to walk,
there is only going forwards or going backwards;
there is no such thing as bad timing,
because all that is meant to happen and when
will happen no matter what –
and whether you stand still, or not,
the Earth will keep spinning.

Life is about lying down
and then getting back up stronger than ever;
weaved into the very fabric
of the reality of the world,
there is a beginning, an end,
a meaning, and a plan;
life is meant to be shared
and lived together;
though we all may be imperfect
when we compare ourselves to other people,
the majority of humanity is,
in my humble opinion,
perfect in their imperfectness –
and just as no two people
were ever born to be exactly the same as each other,
to me it would be a failure in and of itself
to ever doubt or lose any kind of confidence
in any woman or any man.

My Poem ‘From the top’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My time, my days,
often see me surrounded by people
on an infinite, overwhelming,
incalculable, unfathomable scale;
there are days when the thought
of how many billions of people
there are in the world
literally boggles my mind;
the obsessive observer in me
wants to see everything,
and wants to meet everyone,
and sit down with them,
so that they can tell me their tale;
the dominant writer in me
wants to discover and convey
the meaning of the entire universe
and the meaning of life
and wrap it all up in a story,
or a poem, and leave a message
to live and to love life by
for all of mankind.

I cannot help but look out and see more;
I cannot help but listen and hear
a symphonic opus;
I cannot help by feel drawn
in multiple directions,
while still keeping my feet
firmly on the ground –
like a rocket of potential
waiting to launch;
I cannot tell you how much love means to me,
and to me the meaning and the feeling of love
is the most important thing in and of my heart
that I wholly trust.

Most things occur and are where they are
according to a plan;
everyone is defined by their own unique chemistry
that, to some degree, dictate the things in life
they can’t have and the things that,
if they want to, they can have;
knowing what to do and when
is one of the key indefinable instincts
in attaining your dreams;
some things, no matter how simple
they are on the outside,
are not what they seem.

Trillions of stars,
billions of planets,
millions of galaxies,
thousands of possibilities,
hundreds of variations,
tens of directions –
but only one of each of us;
each of us bound,
each of us free,
each of us still connected
genetically to ancestors
and to distant family members
who once spent a great deal of time
thinking, adapting, understanding,
and swinging from the branches of trees.

The farther back in time we go
into the history of Earth,
and the more we read of humanities
relationship with the planet
we are blessed to live on,
we can tell and we can see
the direct effect that we as a species
have had on our environment,
on life, on ourselves,
and the most fundamental fingerprint
of humanity is the ability
to deliver change globally –
both quickly, and slowly,
quietly, and sometimes boldly –
and because change is in our nature,
we sometimes do not know when
or how to stop.

One thing that I have learned about life
is that nothing is predetermined in stone –
but a prosperous and a hopeful future for all
can happen if people work together,
and if hope can be promised, assured,
and delivered every time it is spoken,
or shown by those who in the pyramid of the world
lead from the front as well as from the top.