When you look to the heavens for splendor
but encounter the night-black sky
with islands of fire singeing an emptiness
thinning to void;
when you turn to the earth for assurance
and consider the moss-bound boulder,
witness to endless millennia,
parent of pebbles and dust;
when you ponder your fragile life,
ephemeral as wren-song,
tender as scent of jessamine
swept by a freshening wind;
when you cling to the edge of immensity
remember your birth.
Your conception was always contingent.
The odds of your mother were one in a million,
her mother much the same.
You are the product of astrophysics,
the toss of quintillion cosmic dice,
the orderly flow of atoms and energy
forged in the cores of stars.
And you are a flesh-bound being of light,
passion-child of chance and law,
a thirty-trillion-cell machine
of spit and dust, and dreams.
Though the force of disorder breaks over all
and your atoms come unglued,
the world in which you never were
is not the world that came to be.
Woven from a wisp of time,
your mind was made to roam
where death cannot constrain. Come
step beyond the temporal veil
to claim the ancient eons
before our ancestors evolved.
Come face the untold epochs
after our kind has passed.
I am the voice of a universe,
and you – you are, too.
The whole of time is before us.
Will you come, too?
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| Bubble Nebula - Hubble image by NASA |
