An Open Letter to Voyager 2
                   By John Updike

Dear Voyager:
     This is to thank you for
The last twelve years, and wishing you, what's more,
Well in your new career in vacant space.
When you next brush a star, the human race 
May be a layer of old sediment,
A wrinkle of the primates, a misspent
Youth of some zo”morphs.  But you, your frail
Insectoid form, will skim the sparkling vale
Of the void practically forever.  As
The frictionless light-years and aeons pass,
The frozen points that from Earth's vantage held
Their mythic patterns firm will shift and melt;
No wide-dish radios will strain to hear
Your whispered news, nor poets call you dear.

Ere then, let me assure you, you've been grand ---
A little shaky at the outset, and
Arthritic in the swivel-joints, antique
In circuitry, virtually deaf, and weak
As a refrigerator bulb, you kept
Those picture postcards coming.  Signals crept
To Pasadena, where they were enhanced
Until those planets clear as daylight danced.
The stripes and swirls of Jupiter's slow boil,
Its crazy moons, one cracked, one fried in oil,
One glazed with ice, and one too raw to eat,
Still cooking in the juice of inner heat,
Arrived on our astonished monitors.
Then, next, after a station break of years,
Fat Saturn rode your feeble beam, and lo! ---
Not corny as we feared, but art deco ---
The hard-edge, Technicolor rings, as thin 
As cardboard, broader than Lake Michigan,
And casting flashlit shadows.  Planet three
Was Uranus (accented solemnly
By anchormen on the first syllable,
Lest viewers think the "your" too personal):
A glassy globe of gas upon its side,
Its nine dark, close-knit rings at last descried,
Its corkscrew-shaped magnetic passions bared,
Its pocked attendants digitized and aired.
Last loomed, against the Oort cloud, blue Neptune,
Its counterrevolutionary moon,
Its wispy arcs of rings and whitish streaks
Of unpredicted tempests --- thermal freaks,
As if an unused backyard swimming pool,
Remote from stirring sunlight, dark and cool
(Sub-sub-sub-freezing), by itself would splash.
Displays of splendid waste, of rounded trash!
Your looping miles of guided drift brought home
How barren cosmic space would be to roam.
One awful ball succeeds another, none
Fit for a shred or breath of life.  Our one
Delightful, verdant orb was primed to cede
The H2O and O and N we need.
Your survey, in its scrupulous depiction,
Purged from the solar system science fiction ---
No more Uranians or Io-ites,
Just Earthlings dreaming through their dewy nights.

You saw where we could not, and dared to go
Where we could scarcely dream; you showed
A kind of metal courage, and faithfulness.
Your cryptic, ciphered, graven messages
Are for ourselves, designed to boomerang
Back like a prayer from where the angels sang,
That shining ancient blank encirclement.
Your voyage now outsoars mundane intent
And joins matter's blind motion.  Au revoir,
You rickety free-falling man-made star!
Machines, like songs, belong to all.  A man
Aloft is Russian or American,
But you aloft were simply sent by Man
At large.
     Sincerely yours,
               A fan.