Browsing through my computer picture archive I found some I took on a trip a few years ago to Germany. I visited what had been the RCAF’s #4 Wing at Baden where I lived while a teenager. There is a building that serves as a museum that contains mementos and pictures. There’s a poem on the wall called High Flight, written by RCAF fighter pilot and poet John Gillespie Magee Jr in 1941. He had flown up to 33,000 feet in a Spitfire and was struck by words he had read in another poem, “To touch the face of God”. It is the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Air Force. It is on display at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, the National Air Force Museum of Canada,, the Cadet Field House at the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Air Force National Museum. It goes like this: “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth. And danced the skies on laughter silvered wings. Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung, high in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace. Where never lark or even eagle flew—And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod, the high untrespassed sanctity of space, put out my hand ,and touched the face of God”.

That’s Coffeetalk. I’m Vic Dubois.