Voyager I - by Sarah Day

ISLAND | ISSUE 159
voyager.jpg

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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Sarah Day

Sarah Day’s eighth collection of poems, Towards Light (Puncher & Wattmann), was published in 2018. It was shortlisted for the Tasmania Premier’s Literary Awards. Before that, Tempo (2013) was shortlisted for the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and received the University of Melbourne Wesley Michelle Wright Prize. Sarah lives in Tasmania.

https://www.sarahday.com.au/
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