"Probably my favorite poem"

Since dad passed, I've been wanting to have a vision or a dream about what he's doing now. Everyone kept saying how "he's in a better place" or "now he can go anywhere with us". I can accept those thoughts in the sense of his memory or him being "in our hearts" but I wanted to know that he..the person...the man of dad...his physical body-renewed, if you will, was still alive and laughing and thriving somewhere else. What would have been even better than a vision or a dream though would be a "sign" or message directly from him somehow.

I never knew dad to be into poetry, which he wasn't. I never heard him talk about any poem, ever, besides the poem Footprints, which he loved. Yesterday, I was looking through a book that Alisa and I made of his stories and jokes that we gave to him for Father's Day a couple years ago. I found a folded piece of paper in it with a poem copied in dad's handwriting that helped me. At the bottom of the page, dad wrote "probably my favorite poem":

High Flight 

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 ever 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.

                                                                      
                                                                         — John Gillespie Magee, Jr

Have fun, daddy. I love you.

-Diane