I visited Oxford several years ago, and took a guided tour of the back streets. At one corner, we stopped where the monk, Roger Bacon may have taught in the 1270s. He was jailed for experimenting with gun powder, and predicting that one day boats would travel without sails, carts would go without horses, and -- horrors -- we would all fly. The Aussies, Yanks, and Canadians in the crowd chuckled because we had all arrived on jets. When the tour ended, I walked back to the main street and heard an unistakable sound. Glancing way down the lanes of traffic to a copse of trees, I saw Roger Bacon's Vision

“If man doth throw a stick,”


Ladies and gentlemen,
Flight Zero-Zero-Zero-Two from Kennedy
Airport
To London’s Heathrow
is ready for boarding.
Please extinguish all smoking materials at
this time.

“So shall the power of man’s arm be transmuted to the stick...”

Ladies and gentlemen,
Flight Zero-Zero-Zero-Two is ready for
takeoff.
Please make sure your seat belts are
fastened.
Your seat back is upright,
and your tray-tabes are locked.

“...And so shall the stick fly across the earth.”

Ladies and gentlemen,
this is Captain Lockhard speaking--
We’re cruising along at about 35,000 feet.
We'll land at Heathrow about nine a.m.
London time.
Sit back and enjoy your flight.

“And if the stick be big enough, so
shall man ride up[on it
I know not why it cannot be.”

Ladies and gentlemen,
for flight Zero-Zero-Zero-Two’s staff
Welcome to London’s Heathrow Airport
It’s 9:15 am.

For my thought of sticks I sat jailed;
Scorned by the Middle Ages:
A monk despised by Franciscan Friends,
rotting in my Oxford cell.

Cold, alone, staring at the street, my heart
forsook my silly thought.
‘Til the urchin’s stick flew quickly past. I
knew once more what well might come.

You ride that stick o’er my jail’s place and
scoff at what they did to me.
But think:
For what strange thoughts do you judge
friends?
And make them rejects, much like me?