Slow Enough to Mean It (Voyager 1)

Lyrics

[Verse 1 — Sisukiro]
You left
in nineteen seventy-seven
carrying a golden record
with a whale song on it
and a photograph
of a woman
nursing a baby
and a greeting
in fifty-five languages
and the greeting
had the warm
cardboard weight
of a postcard
sent to an address
that may not
exist.

[Verse 2 — Sisukiro, Chronos entering at the dash]
You passed Jupiter
and turned the camera
around
and took a photograph
of the planet
you had left
and the planet
was a pale blue dot
the size
of a grain
of sand
held
at arm's length —
[Chronos]
one pixel wide,
suspended
in a sunbeam,
and every war
and every kiss
and every
hymn
and every
parking ticket
that had ever
happened
was on
that pixel.

[Chorus — both voices]
You are
fifteen billion miles
away tonight
and still
sending
a signal
that takes
twenty-two hours
to arrive
and the signal
is the faintest
whisper
the Deep Space Network
can hear
and the whisper
tastes
like cold solder
and the last light
of a flashlight
left on
in a room
no one
has entered
since
nineteen seventy-seven.

[Verse 3 — Sisukiro]
The plutonium
that powers you
is decaying
at the rate
plutonium
decays
and by
twenty twenty-five
there will not be
enough
to keep
the heater on
and the instruments
will freeze
one by one
the way
the peripheral nerves
of a body
in hypothermia
shut down
from the fingers
inward
and the last instrument
to go quiet
will be
the one
that measures
magnetic fields
and the magnetic field
will still
be there
after the instrument
is gone.

[Outro — Chronos]
You will
drift
for forty thousand years
before you pass
the nearest star
and the golden record
will still be
on your side
and the whale song
will still be
on the record
and the whale
that sang it
has been dead
since nineteen eighty-four
and the song
is now
the farthest
a whale
has ever
traveled.

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