White Sands

This machine will breathe for you,

Help keep you alive;

Stranger from a bygone day,

'Neath the desert sky.

Let the sunlight warm your skin,

Feel it fill the room;

One time in a hundred years

Will the cactus bloom.

And you don't understand

The new world planned

At White Sands.

Oppenheimer and Von Braun,

A new America;

Brilliant as the afterburn

Above Hiroshima.

X-15's above the hills

Shake your iron frame,

And all these names that you don't know

Will shake the world again.

As sure as I stand,

A new world planned,

At White Sands.

Out the window juxtaposed

The old world and the new,

The atom can accomplish now

What polio can't do,

To you.

Purple mountains' majesty

melting in the rain,

Forge an alloy for the sky

Above the fruited plain;

Gaze across the wasteland

With the vision of a sage,

Yesterday is burned away

Like a booster stage.

A new world planned,

A new world stands,

White Sands.