[Martin Elster]

Fliss, I'm glad you feel the full rhyme works better. I hope you're not too tired from getting up too early. But it sounds like you are doing your job, despite that. Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky are some of my favorite composers.

I'm in the middle of watching a video about the Voyager probes, both of them having gone past the heliopause (the boundary of the heliosphere, caused by the sun's magnetic field). They are now beyond the influence of the sun's radiation (the end of the solar system) and are at the beginning of interstellar space (which has its own magnetic field — the probes are bombarded by cosmic rays from supernovae, etc.). They have sailed through an 89,000ºF wall of plasma, which is the interstellar medium colliding with the heliopause.

Here is a poem I wrote a while ago about those probes.

Voyagers

Two eagles soared amid the Jovian spheres
before they hurtled past the heliopause,
becoming so unthinkably remote
from Sol, the photons pouring from his throat
now travel a million million miles to cause
those regal twins to lift their silver ears.

They focused in on rings of ice and rock,
great clouds of red, volcano bands the size
of California, moons with skins so bright,
they outshone even Venus’ lustrous white.
These sights had mesmerized the many eyes
that dreamed of rising like a kite or hawk.

Then when they’d reached the solar system’s brink,
one took a backward look and snapped a shot,
a picture of the place their architects
called home, a mote among the sundry specks
revolving round what dwindled to a dot,
its radiance continuing to shrink.

These travelers shall eternally convey
a pair of golden records with the sound
of trains and Bach, of wolves and whales and fire.
Who knows if any being will admire
two earth-born pilgrims launched from sandy ground
to skim the thermals of the Milky Way?

(Appeared in The Chimaera.)