It begins.
A beginning, of course,
That resembles an end.
Empty space separates
And out pours reality
Enthusiastically scurrying
Into the depths.
Ripples in the night
Disturb the silence
And a few lonely particles of matter
Are drawn together,
Attracting in turn other remnants
Until with time
Enough is gathered
To form a star
Enough stars burn and collapse
To form the necessary elements
And somewhere in the supreme isolation
Of space and time
Our planet is formed.
As luck would have it,
An occasional bombardment of comets
Brings enough water and carbon
To this strange place
On the edge of a galaxy
For the sun, and the water, and the elements
To combine in even stranger ways
And to give out life.
Weak, exposed and vulnerable,
But vibrant with the ability
To grow, and to reproduce, and to change
Until with time
With time beyond our comprehension,
Change produces complexity
Change produces yet more change
And change, of course, cannot be controlled.
I stand and face the hillside
And stare at the record of that change
A slow accumulation of mud
Pressed down upon by fresh accumulations
Building a thin layer of rock
A mere million years deep
Before some chance disturbance
Perhaps a distant volcano
Produces a brief pause in the process
Which shows as a line in the rock
Then normality returns
And another million years of dust
Is built up upon the pile.
Until, with time
With time beyond our comprehension,
A mountain has been built
And within that mountain
The body of a thing long dead
Has been preserved
Crushed flat by the hills.
I stare at the shape of its death,
And think of my own,
And think of our own.
It ends, of course,
With a record of us in the rock
And with a disintegration of rock
And of all things.
It ends
And as we all know
Endings are different
To what happens at the start.
© Andy Brown, May 2014
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