It must necessarily have no life.
Only life competes for resources:
to continue living, to dominate,
some will struggle, will give up, give out,
will be vanquished, will perish, die.
The Universe had no life for eons of time,
and presumably no conscious life to measure it,
but only the building blocks.
Life could not have survived the conditions,
when all was elementary particles creating heat,
explosions, all in chaos, when all was molten or void.
I try to imagine life having never been.
What would that Universe be?
Rock, dust, the nuclear furnaces of stars,
and the empty vacuum of space;
Quarks (Up, Charm, Top,
Down, Strange, Bottom);
Electrons (Electron, Muon, Tau);
Neutrinos (E, Muon, Tau).
There are no grasshoppers, no trees.
Nowhere would there be birds or bees,
no hair or blood, no ears or eyes,
no death to fulfill, no demise.
The great events in history
did not occur, no mystery
did fascinate our curious
minds. There simply never was us.
Imagination
for all it destroys, so it
creates everything
All rights reserved ©2020 Todd Franklin Osborn
I love this poem, Todd. It explores something that's very interesting (and a bit frightening) to think about, and I think you capture that well. I love the last little stanza in particular.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much. I tried to use verses conceptually, beginning with an open rhythm, then moving to a strict 8 beats per line, and ending with a haiku, all of this to reflect the development of the Universe, but also of consciousness and our human way of understanding things.
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