Voyager 1 image, 3.7 billion miles from home
If those who would abandon earth
could look back so far, home might seem
only faintly where the heart is.
Here in our local minds, stars shine
blindingly bright in Earth’s gravity.
Here brains split into left and right
hemispheres, multiverses of human,
superhuman, and subhuman dimensions.
Some overweight bodies grow fatter now
and pull down the others.
If only the Voyager could look back, photograph,
and send back news of what we have become,
see the alternate universe where people,
not the planet, are getting warmer.
If only the picture did not fade with distance,
if only a better world were not the lost one;
if only telescopic vision pulled the future closer;
if only …
Have we in so much quantum entanglement,
such virtual realities of Artificial Intelligence,
become devolutionaries, Darwin’s nightmare,
survival of the shitiest, opposite how
pipe dreamers thought we’d evolve?
Out there in the vast space of possibility,
surely by now some creature has tamed its kind,
learned to be kind, and through the voyages
of a greater mind, knows better than to land
on this deconstruction zone, this pale blue dot.