Radiation

Gazing up at the darkness,
Mystified by heaven, the
Pattern of the stars,
This face is bathed in radiation
Invisible to the eye.
Just as, in sunlight,
Bare arms soak up the summer's warmth,
So are we showered with waves
From a different source,
Beyond any galaxy,
And older than the stars.

That was what perplexed astronomers.
Pointing their radio telescopes
High above the plane of our own galaxy,
They heard a whispering
Unaccounted for.
Microwaves showering the earth
From all directions
Invariant with time or season
Were discovered to be the remnants
Of the oldest event.

Following the spectral lines of
Fleeting galaxies,
The shadows of elements
Shifted to the red
We trace back the paths
Of an expanding universe
To the threshold of its inception,
Peering through the past
At light centuries old.
Our recent past nearby: Orion, Andromeda
And the farther we gaze,
So younger are the stars —
Youths in the distance.
And beyond them, babes yet unnamed.
Farther back, mere embryos
Until time and space converge in a single point:
And there was light.
A hundred billion degrees, and more,
Radiation so dense,
Particles of light were colliding with one another, creating...

You and me. Oh, not so directly, of course,
But out of these collisions
Came electrons and neutrinos,
Protons and neutrons, and their counterparts —
The stuff of which you and I are made:
A transformation of light
Into matter.
So we build accelerators
That launch electrons careening down a two-mile path
Slamming them headlong into tungsten
That we might observe this event,
And so probe the nature of our own existence,
Improbably here.

From a moment, one vast explosion
The universe flooded with light
Electrons and neutrinos from spontaneously
As photons collide with enough energy
To create their mass
Temperatures so hot
The radiation blasted apart nuclei
As fast as they could form,
Preventing heavy elements from appearing too soon;
The universe expanding just fast enough
To give us the perfect balance of hydrogen and helium
That our stars might burn the way they do
Fashioning in their cores
The necessary ingredients for life
Slowly cooking the heavier elements over the course of time
Then, with a flash of light
Yielding up these elements
As the star explodes.

And so our planet forms
Rich with all of the building blocks for live
And we are created out of the dust
Of exploded stars.

We sit in the sunshine
At a sidewalk cafe, drinking tea,
While you tell me of your troubles
That seem so complex.
We scarcely give a though to this flesh,
Whose cells are vastly different from one another
Each performing its appointed function:
Under protective skin,
Blood cells cart oxygen all over our bodies
Even to the taste buds that tell our brain
How much we enjoy the shortbread that came with tea.

And to this, add molecules, the structure of atoms,
All precisely working together –
The strong and weak nuclear forces balanced perfectly
That you might have any difficulties to begin with.
Or any joys.

Planned from the first,
These elements that make up your brain,
Your teeth, and the hand that you write with,
Fashioned carefully in the cores of stars
Billions of years ago.

And these microwaves showering the earth
Remind us of our beginnings
In a flash of light
Waves intensely hot
Drawn out over the fabric of space, as it's
Flung from the force of the blast;
Radiation cooling slowly through millenia
Only to bathe us gently as we walk under the stars.