Maybe one day a boy is outside

in the backyard.  He is pulling weeds.  Suddenly
a Spaceship
crash-lands, digging a giant furrow in the middle of his yard.

And maybe he is angry because the craft just utterly obliterated
his Rose Garden.
He walks over and notices the Golden Record
it carries, gleaming like a Sun Disk orbited by planetary dust motes.

And maybe, he notices the encoded Etchings and Symbols
deliberately dug into the surface, canyons and gorges
to the people who created them but only inconsequential
wild animal scratches in his mind.

And maybe, he looks around at his destroyed Garden.
He looks at his soul and spirit from which he grew
Hope and Comfort and Future,
a city now burned and crushed to the ground,

And maybe he pauses for a moment,
slowly reaches out-
gingerly takes the Yellow Circle-
cradles it in his hands-
And smashes it into a million shards of historical razors.

Ages of knowledge float away with the golden dust
as the unrelenting wind carries away
the Call into the void,
the Shout from death.

And maybe in light of a few dead Flowers,
the murder of an entire planet
seems tinted with justice,
a spotlight shining on the least important actor.

And maybe the boy, not fully conscious of what has transpired,
does not see millions lying dead
around him.  He only sees the absence of Flowers,
no longer swaying in the wind.

Maybe one day a billion years previously The Voyager
was launched into the cosmos.
A message in a bottle
filled with the very Essence of Humanity.

And maybe one day a billion years later,
long after the Earth is a smoldering collection of asteroids,
a Spacecraft approaches the atmosphere of an alien planet.
Pulled down by gravity, air resistance, and fate.