Here is Meredi Ortega’s winning poem in the Australian Poetry Science Poetry Competition.
The poem imagines the liner notes that might accompany the golden phonograph records attached to Voyagers 1 and 2 as they leave the Solar System and begin their travels into interstellar space. As Carl Sagan, one of the contributors to the Voyager project once mused, the records will in all probability outlive the human race and even the Earth itself.
The records also feature in popular culture, including in this moving scene between Josh Lyman and Donna Moss in The West Wing.
Meredi Ortega
Liner Notes, Voyager Golden Record
01 blue planet ambassadors well versed in sifting emptiness
cut star to star from space, humpbacks still appear safety scissored
in need of pasting back
after UN greetings, they sing something along the lines of
. the water’s beautiful, come on in
all twinkle-eyed leviathan
02 this mudpot is spluttering oes in another clabbery universe
. this grey mud is falling in love, taking up flute
03 crickets chirping in space
. it gets funnier as the centuries pass and there’s the rub
of flight into song, thunder into surf
perhaps what those Californians say is true, about crickets and elephants
. and planets all quavering the same way
all harking back to the big nothing or something
04 hyena’s laugh bone ravening, raving
. we send the devil interstellar
played backwards
. it is only moon chirr and the lone night song of a prairie mouse
05 first tools Carl Sagan searched Midtown for stones to record
spalling not rolling
. but the city sold knives and its roads were unknappable
. he might have known it was too simple
such reduction would require samples experts, goggles, gloves
06 morse code di-dah dah-di-dit, stars through hardships, to the stars
sh-star star-sh-ship through the hard to the tsars
07 horse and cart before horses turned into Saturn V rockets
they were Lucky and Daisy, collared to the endless schlep of things
. prehensile lipped, crumping hay and snickering at the moon
08 morning star song, Venus rising comet dust string
to a lorikeet dawn, ironwood fire cracking, reverberation of the verse
stringybark sugarbag lines of song
09 queen of the night aria accompanied by city lights
anyone can be queen of the night star sequins
. dagger, drag, delusions of colorature
10 the fifth four-notes-of THE SUN
DNA, cells dividing, double helix uncoiling upper strings
ribs, continents drifting, dunes sequoia, snowflake, rush hour
variations on wasp, spindled shell, dolphins leaping
Golden Gate Bridge, man with machete
book page, swan sun horns floating through space
11 flowing streams plum-blossomed ch’in
silk-stop-strumming the water’s course
. heard and understood only by Chung Tzuch’i
and so the world’s last reader of poetry
upon whose death all strings will unriver or so we like to believe
12 dark was the night his blade slid on strings, boy eyes burnt
hot coins in his tin Texan sky, crab gumbo
this moaning life, everything a sort of guddling
. then back into the gyre, like he ever left it
another spinning sun forgotten stylus at record’s end
