Categories
Miscellaneous Poetry

Singularity

by ~ Marie Howe

   (after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home


Read by Roshi Susan Murphy…

1 reply on “Singularity”

A poem of childhood when my days were filled with hugging horses, dogs and cats, floating sticks down streams, making tunnels in the hay shed, and see-sawing on a 5-bar gate – no telephone pings, no computers, no Facebook, free from the demands of emails…halcyon days. This poem is now a beacon for adults like me ….may we listen and listen and listen.

Comments are closed.