Voyager Record

10/1/10

Time
destroys all
things
.............or
Each
moment exists
forever.

Thirty-three
years ago
Carl Sagan married a
woman he'd never kissed
because he knew what it meant
to be part of the
Cosmos.

"For keeps, Annie,"
--he knew it.
Her task--
to gather sounds,
all the sounds
that define us,

Earthings, 1978

the pop of a kiss,
a mother's first greeting
to newborn
child, Bach, "Hello"
in 59 human
lanuages and
one whale
language and waterfalls
and drones of traffic peppered
with horns

Annie searched up and
low, finding Flowing
Streams,
a song well-suited
to stand by her sounds,
to be pressed
the Record-
built to last
thousands of millions
of years,
through long stretches of space
or earth travel
then found,
oh, these sounds!
flowing behind
nervous
systems compressed into
intonation, reconstituted
into thought
thousands of years
after one spaceship
leapt into voids
carrying a record
and a meditation.