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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.

Copyright © Thomas Anderson, Angry Young Grad Student Music