Poetry Month: Genesis

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Genesis

Chapter One
¹ In the beginning, there was nothing,
Nothing but the void and dark;
which suddenly exploded
from the singularity’s spark.

² Power poured into existence.
And with it, birthed a goddess;
Wild and unpredictable,
Yet behind-the-scenes and modest.

³ She condensed the lightest atoms,
And sent them t’wards the growing border.
she wore a mask of quantum;
Thus hid chaos in this order.

⁴ Guided by her unseen hand,
The hydrogen crashed and collided;
If they were fast, they fused in two:
Helium, nuclei undivided.

⁵ The atoms danced a billion years –
And with gravity’s permission –
Collapsed into a stellar cloud,
And twisted the ignition.

⁶ The first star was a beacon:
“and”, t’was said, “There was light”.
But the prime star soon went nova,
Flinging metals ‘cross the night.

⁷ Thus the elements danced with chaos –
A fierce foxtrot, death and birth;
Then the star sol scorched the heavens,
And gave rise to the Earth.

⁸ That small and rocky planetoid,
The third child from its parent sun,
Was rained upon with water, wet,
From which the threads of life were spun.

Chapter Two
⁹ Now Chaos had her eye on earth.
she quelled its crust volcanic,
and brought down with her unseen hand
The molecules organic.

¹⁰ And with a careful nudge from Chaos,
They combined into amino acids,
And thus the building blocks of life were made,
Underneath an ocean surface, placid.

¹¹ The Goddess, ever curious,
Tinkered on the continental shelf,
Until her experiments devised
A molecule that could replicate itself.

¹² This proto-strand of DNA
Became the first single-celled creature;
The first of many wondrous things
That this small rock would feature.

¹³ As they went forth and multiplied,
Some forms ate sunlight while some just ate,
And they specialised and diversified
Into cells which learned to conjugate.

¹⁴ For solitary cells are weak,
But together make a mighty prison.
Behold, great monsters of the sea
Which from the depths have risen.

¹⁵ Chaos, with mysterious grin,
Played god of evolution;
And with the waters getting full,
Divined a sound solution:

¹⁶ “I’ll give them arms; I’ll give them legs,
They’ll crawl on land and breathe the air!
I’ll graft on some the gift of flight,
And soon they will be everywhere!”

Chapter Three
¹⁷ Thus began an age of cold-blooded kings,
Of gargantuan insects and terrible lizards;
Some lived on plants but most ate other things,
Ripping out flesh from the guts and the gizzards.

¹⁸ The periods flew by – chalk it up to cretaceous –
And played out for millions of years prehistoric;
Then Chaos, in ways both playful and audacious,
Jostled a comet, which went meteoric.

¹⁹ The end of the world came sooner than thought,
But lo, not every creature was extinct:
The dinosaurs’ reign had all come to naught,
But in the aftermath, a furry small blink.

²⁰ For milk-making monsters who mulled the mid-night,
They revelled in wake of the loss of the lizards,
And grew and evolved to a decent new height,
And survived the ice ages and snowfalls and blizzards.

²¹ Then one fateful day, on an open savannah,
A dominant life form began to take shape:
The story oft told is it slipped on a banana;
It’s hard to walk on two legs, for an ape.

²² The millennia ticked by; and brains were selected
By other lone monkeys looking for prime mates,
And over the years, this process affected
The development of some evolutionary traits.

²³ As their minds expanded, the monkeys grew smart:
Developing math, religion, and more:
Philosophy, music, politics, and art;
But also murder, pollution, Suffering, and war.

²⁴ Now Chaos, who was never far away,
Looked down upon the human scrimmage;
And she laughed upon their work and play,
For they were truly made of her image.

²⁵ It’s been billions of years since Chaos, undecided,
Threw dust together and sired the Earth.
Now that the whole back-story has been provided,
It’s time to go out there and prove what it’s worth.

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I had an assignment to submit a mind map summarizing the origins of the cosmos for my science class. Obviously I don't know what a mind map is, but I really enjoyed writing this poem, and creating the image that I had to submit. Yay for learning new things in Photoshop!