Voyager I - by Sarah Day
ISLAND | ISSUE 159
1
Screen
The digits on the NASA site
flash by too quickly
for the eye to read. Voyager I
is speeding away from home,
from you and me.
I try to read the miles out loud
but fail, Voyager is moving faster
than the speed of sound,
toward the beginning,
toward the incipient end.
2
Night Sky
Above the bed the skylight,
like a screen itself, records
the illusion of rotating stars,
their depth far deeper than
the night itself. The more
you look the more you see
that in the windowpane’s infinity
the Milky Way is smaller than a speck,
a mote that floats across
the lens of comprehension.
3
Laika
Could the lifeless feel
a hint of existential fear
Voyager might compute that
Laika’s solitude just glimpsed
the brink of the abyss.
Alone in orbit round the Earth
the canine cosmonaut
was leashed to home by gravity,
though as her keepers
gently sealed her fate
standing back to watch the engines
launch her into hell,
cosmic space would shrink
within the void of betrayal.
4
Oort
The orbits of Uranus, Pluto,
now traversed, vast loops
like vinyl record grooves
within diminishing memory,
the latent sounds of Earth
sublimely sprint across
the outer reaches
of our solar system’s gravity
toward the icy cloud of Oort.
Somewhere in interstellar space
Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto
Number 2 in F
or ancient songs of Arnhem Land
will call dark space to bright attention,
the polyphony of Georgian mountain
song set each star to quiver
in its hall. And what will space make
of a river running over stones,
a human baby’s cry? The skewed
but graced diversity of life on Earth;
our best foot forward
to the wondering universe. ▼
Image: Kevin Gill
This poem appeared in Island 159 in 2020. Order a print issue here.
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