The Story of the Universe
by
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I. Universe
At first, there was a spark,
That was all space,
That was all time,
That was all being.
There was nothing beyond it,
Because there was no beyond it.
There was nothing before it,
Because there was no before it.
It was smaller than an atom,
But greater than all the atom bombs
In the Universe,
Because it was the Universe –
A lonely spark of being,
In the emptiness.
From the beginning,
The Universe was flawed,
Its perfect symmetry,
Destroyed by rippling waves
That coursed through
The primordial fire.
It was a little diamond,
Shimmering with imperfections.
These were the seeds
Of galaxies,
The seeds of us.
The spark exploded,
And tore itself apart,
Flinging space,
To create space,
Time,
To create time.
In the glowing fireball,
Flashes of matter and anti-matter
Appeared,
Collided,
And destroyed each other,
Like knights at battle,
Raising a cloud
Of fiery dust,
In which only
Flashes of matter
Remained.
The cloud grew,
But it could not be seen.
The light within
Was trapped
By raging plasma,
Flying for eons
From fire to fire
Without finding a way out
From the smoldering cloud.
At last, the plasma cooled,
The atoms formed,
And the light was free –
Free to begin
Its lonely course,
To our eyes.
What once had been a spark,
Was now a shimmering cloud,
Vast and growing
At the speed of light -
A nuclear hurricane
Blasting through the void,
Creating in its wake,
Time, space and being.
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About the Book
The Story of the Universe was inspired by a very old idea—that the universe is one river and that galaxies, stars, planets, and people are all whirls and eddies in the universal flow, arising in the universe as naturally as whirls and eddies arise in a fast-flowing river. The universe arose once upon a time in a place that created time and space. It spread in darkness like an exploding black hole until there was light. It was pure energy in pure symmetry—almost. The imperfections weighed down upon space, gathering energy and mass into vortices, which turned into galaxies, which created stars, which created planets, which created us.
Converting the language of science into poetry, this poem is an attempt to unite religion and science using a very simple idea. We can disagree about whether the universe had a creator, but we can all agree that the universe is our creator. These verses also seek to bridge the gulf between art and science by showing that science is a rich vein of poetry for artists to mine.
About the Author
Yan Gertsoyg, born in Moscow in 1966, has lived and traveled all over the world. He holds a BA in philosophy, an MA in interdisciplinary studies, and a JD; he has been a lawyer for more than thirty years. He is also the author of Emergence of Value: Out of Chaos, on the origins of ethics, and The Fire Sea of Wonder: Philosophic Poems in Prose. He is married and lives in Canada.