This qinah purposely follows the structure of, and borrows phrases from, the text of Ma’oz Tzur. It was inspired by, of all things, a “Ruin a song by changing the first three words” Facebook post – someone had responded to it with “Ma’oz Tzarot…” and the rest all but wrote it itself. . . .

In 2016 after reading David Brin’s Earth (1990), I wrote this blog post and later felt inspired to write this variant of El Malé for the vessels and probes that carry our dream of space science, and then also for the astronauts who died while pursuing that dream. . . .