Voyager Album Drop; a poem

ARGUMENT: In 1977 NASA launched Voyager 1 with the express purpose of studying the outer solar system and beyond. It was aimed towards Gliese 445 (an M-type main sequence star the constellation Camelopardalis) and contains two LPs pressed in gold. The hot tracks include greetings and salutations in 55 languages as well as music and other audible art from cultures around the world. It also contains a concise description of human anatomy and our location in the cosmos…should anyone wish to come knocking.

The records went

Further than humans’ ever gone.

There is comfort in the thought

Those who find them will not meet me.

They’ll meet Brahms, the chanting Diné, Robert Jonson.

When they meet us there will be music

Without conquest, because we won’t be there.

Out of the sky the album drops,

Endless parties and writhing tendrils on blue sand acid beaches,

Chill sessions in alien living rooms around spinning tables.

They will receive only the best and rudimentary aspects of us.

When they learn how much like us they are they will

Turn.

Turn on each other and turn again.

Gold turns around, on themselves turned.

The endless expanse of a planet orange with fire

Burns as a speck in a telescope. A new orange planet in the sky,

Monuments of dark stone progress into ruins.

Children will slay their parents in hot emotion

Felt for the first time ever.

Of the smoking ash we will discover

Only one thing alive and operational. A spinning gold disk

And the crackle of static off an eroded needle.