Bradbury's story "Kaleidoscope" and Lightfoot's song "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" had an afternoon together and produced this in my head.

#parody #filk #folk

The legend lives on from the captains on down Of the rocket that went all to pieces Space, it is said, never gives up its dead When the atmosphere’s cycling ceases With a load of components weighing two full tons more Than the aging old rocket could carry, That old ship we knew would throw out her whole crew To the vacuum that waited there gravely.

The men were all thrown to every point known And a few that were never discovered And they shouted at first through their radio burst As they realized they'd not be recovered To their deaths did they fall, a dozen in all Speeding farther away from each other And as dying men do, they fought with a slew Of feelings and hates they had smothered.

Sealed in their spacesuits, they drifted apart At a hundred and ten miles an hour Hollis watched helpless as he flew toward Earth, Stone caught up in a meteor shower. Their radios kept them in touch all along Disbelief, fear and hatred grew stronger And now that the captain was bound for the Moon None of them took one note of his order.

Applegate, he seemed determined to hurt Every man who was still with the living He’d blackballed old Hollis, the captain he shunned From connection or taking or giving Lespere got to talking of wives and of homes He had had on Mars, Venus and Saturn And he knew he would die a happy man, why He remembered the life that he’d had him.

Hollis examined his life as he flew Ever closer to Earth’s gravitation And found that he’d done nothing real with his life Because of his long hesitation Oh sure, he'd had dreams, but they’re not what they'd seemed When your comrades have always been living And now, far too late, he took on the weight Of a universe much less forgiving

Stone calmed them down, they apologized ‘round As the group they had been flew to pieces They all said goodbye and continued to fly Out to places that moved in the creases Of the suns and the stars and the meteor bars That crisscrossed the heavens and planets Their voices did fade as they all parted ways Toward gravestones of marble and granite

Hollis fell swiftly toward Earth and his home Though he knew he would never see any Of the places he’d lived and grown and believed That he’d fly away out and see many Planets and suns and moonbeams and stars And the whole of the galaxy’s heaven And now as he fell down to Earth, he could tell That his ashes would feed fields like leaven.

No one remembers the names of the crew Or what cost them their lives on that voyage The rocket’s a wreck, a big haunted speck Technological wastage and spoilage The legend lives on from the captains on down Of the rocket that went all to pieces Space, it is said, never gives up its dead When the atmosphere’s cycling ceases