Science and religion square-off in this unrhymed poem. |
doesn't it seem reasonable that there is a god and he said: "let there be light let there be land and sea let there be birds and bees and trees and flowers and fruits and people" and that this is ithe origin of the earth? instead: what is the real creation story? that space itself was once minute that all things every plant, every rock, every animal every bit of earth and moon and sun ever star and galaxy were once compressed into a minute amount of space the size of a grapefuit and smaller still that this matter was not in the state that it is now that there were no atoms (there was no room for them!) that this space then began expanding and the reality that we know condensed out of this ultra-dense substance that the first atoms were pulled together by gravity and the material that makes up our earth was produced in these ancient stars and blown out into space in massive explosions, called supernovae that this material was pulled together by gravity in motion around a star and that our earth represents so little of the total amount of material in motion around our own sun a rocky, terrestrial planet just the right size just the right distance from the sun and then: the transition from non-living matter to living matter and the mystery of where living matter begins aeons and aeons of time go by swirling galaxies race away from each other as space continues to expand plants and animals come from the sea to colonize the land species wholly strange and alien to our present world an alien planet that is our own full fo strange and spectacular ferns and reptiles a time before our world of grasses and flowers and seeds giant insects once crawled and flew and dinosaurs: giant and fearsome and awe-striking and diverse a garden of forms two-legged, standing tall, eating meat four-legged, gigantic, soaring necks and sea monsters too real, specacular sea monsters prowled the oceans and then all this was suddenly ended and the planet of life we know today sprung up from the remnants of an apocalyptic disaster an asteroid struck the planet six miles long after a long, lonely voyage from out the endless abyss of space somehow destined to find this one target this tiny oasis of thriving life amid an ocean of dead worlds but: it is not enough to destroy plants and animals completely and the ancestors of humans survive the little creatures who give birth to live young who climb and burrow a humble beginning, to a life-form that will one day uncover this whole story who will unearth ancient bones and study ancient rocks who will explore the planet from the top of Mt. Everest to the deepest ocean canyon who will find the giant, oceanic crater, left behind the whole thing is like a great mystery that was meant to be solved and i think too, that the process of solving it was meant to change us it offers us the spectacular enormous bones and teeth, were all along waiting in the earth to be found swirling galaxies were out there all along out in the deepest recesses of space waiting to be viewed i think it was meant to teach us that the universe is greater than our own little world that in us, the universe gets to know itself for we are it it is us we were there all along even before the atoms that form our bodies condensed out of the primordial plasma we were there waiting to be born along with our world and everything else that lives or ever has lived the whole thing is far stranger than any story truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction it is also a more specacular story than the rather simple: "god said, let there be light" it is a story that involves us and, to an extent uncovers who and what we really are |