GEM OF THE UNIVERSE
words and music (c) 1980 Nancy Ellen Abrams

A friend of mine was ready to
Take her own life
There seemed nothing
You could say
She'd fought for years
To save the beauty of the earth
Saw it get uglier each day
And the powers that be
Were one vast conspiracy. So I said....
Let me take you on my spaceship
For a tour around the planets
Keep your eyes open
I think you’ll change your tune

Have you been on Mercury lately?
There your feet will instantly bakely
Eight hundred degrees
And there ain't no shade!
You can't even sing the blues
There's no atmosphere to use
And you age real fast
When a year's only 88 days

"Let’s move on to Venus," you say,
"Goddess of Beauty in ancient days"
But take a deep breath
And you get thick CO2
The clouds are poison gas, all is dead
Nothing but rock hot enough to melt lead
And it feels when you walk
Like you're slogging through boiling glue
Oooooo!
So how can you think that
The earth's beyond hope --
That life is nothing but doom and gloom?
Let me take you on my spaceship
For a tour around the planets
Keep your eyes open
I think you’ll change your tune

We once thought Mars would be just fine
Nice green people and an earth-like clime
But there's no trace of life
On that cratered world
A warm day there is seventeen below
There's nothing to do and no place to go
Just watch the sunset
While dust storms swirl

On Jupiter, beneath ammonia gas,
Galileo spied a giant hurricane
Through his glass
Four hundred years ago. It's raging still!
Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto --
Cold, dead worlds
That's enough, we don't need to go
There's nothing there like
Good old chlorophyll
So how can you think that
The earth's beyond hope?
That life for us
Couldn’t get much worse?
Warm days, children, birds and trees,
Oxygen blowing free on the breeze:
Earth is a gem of the universe