Physicists believe that the universe is shaped
like the inside of a soccer ball, with holograms
projecting all possible angles of view like Indra’s net;
that black holes extrude through the walls of space-time
like scattered spikes that can suck us out
of this world and into another (could we but survive).
They trumpet dark matter and dark energy,
Places so black that nothing appears to exist.
Neutrinos that no one can see, pour through the gaps
In the particles of our bodies each second,
Without witness, outside the range of sight, unfelt.
Gloriously, we evolved for this world and time,
small bags of water, composed of nothing
But billions of competing colonies of bacteria
animated by a life vibration no one comprehends.
We are stardust. We are eternity experiencing itself
as separation from oneness. We are a hive of cells,
bacteria and systems that let us function
as a singular entity. We have senses to
experience life—our raison d’etre. So darkness fades.
Quivering waves fill our ears with sounds
made in the ancient past, taking light years to arrive.
The sounds of star births and atoms colliding,
of movement and the pulsing of galaxies.
Even hymns of praise and campfire songs
once sung reverberate indefinitely in space.
We are moved to dance and sing in reply like
human Chladni plates.
Our eyes perceive the waves of light bouncing
off imagined forms, and give it names like red and sky blue.
The brilliant nuance of color startles and pleases our eyes.
The tastes of bitter and sweet, sour and salt, define
the objects we start mouthing as infants.
The smells of sweet lilacs and hyacinth, of urine and death,
fill us with emotion and memories of our experiences.
We were made for this world and this time,
We inconsequential life forms of perhaps random origin.
This small, blue planet whose beauty we uncovered
as we floated through space, reveals itself because we experience
explosions of sound and elaborate eruptions of color.