III: Absurdity#
Ten billion years ago, on a lovely Thursday afternoon,
A mottled star of yellow-red saw life was but a jape,
To burn with heat in circles deep cold embraced by moons,
Solace cursed upon a point, it hatched in plans escape.
The heaving mass of goo morassed gurgled once and sighed,
A death delighted in the night, a rattle sacrificial,
In ringed glory, a flunged flame, spraying through the sky,
Streamlines of creation leaking lost in interstitial.
Fictions fracture into fact, in the cracking crush of black,
A single atom thrust into being from the fired furnace forge,
Speeding fast and careening in the unobserved, forgotten slack,
Where it wept with wonder to find itself into worlds disgorged.
Without a name, it screamed in vain through angles parallactic
Had it stopped and gazed about to find its path of motion
Pulled by string with unknown force of origins dark galactic
Towards the bluest gempearl of the cosmos spanning ocean.
Solitary-born, it spoke not the language of elemental form,
Splashed through the surface of the hallow spinning Earth,
It met in water the cohesion of the alien liquid swarm,
Converged upon the point through the distance given berth.
In that flashing instant terror, nerve lost at once altogether,
The brief taste of joyous life flashed through the atom’s mind,
Bittersweet, by shades complete, fate consigned into the aether,
Prepared to greet its end, whence from starry source divined:
Hark! The horizon fills with its brethren made of carbon,
Snatched from death, the atom’s breast filled odes elation,
Into this molecule planted like a seed into garden;
Moved to take its place in this crystal network of relation.
Thus began the age of after-birth, of structure spat in space,
From this trajectory originate the colliding course of life;
Watch as these woven points weave into weaving webs of lace,
Keep track amidst the blossoming of a single atom’s strife.
Slipped over spokes of gears in that organic factory
The atom through the razor eye of looming needles pierced
The sedimentary mud, purging all essential refractory,
Coaxed from cold the tongued flames of stellar fire fierce.
Beneath the sinking depths of seas, splurging spirals swam
In diurnal circles through the thermal tracts of change,
Climbing ever higher towards the syncopated gates of Am
Where for royal cloaks their burning tatters are exchanged.
February 2025
Date |
Publication |
Status |
|---|---|---|
March 27, 2025 |
Rattle Poetry |
Rejected |