Stardust

Today as I slowly zoned out
in my science class,
I thought about how before I learned science,
before I knew what lay beyond us, the planets and moons
and stars and galaxies and black holes and dark matter,
the sky was just sky.
The stars were sparkling fire balls giving us light.
And everything was so simplistic-
this is people,
this is ground,
this is birds and fish and animals,
this is Earth,
this is sky,
here is our moon, darling.

What possibilities lay beyond those words?

Today Bill Bryson's voice comes out of the CD player in our classroom.
"At some point in time, everything, ALL things, were compacted into something so small that it was half the size of an atom. This is called a singularity. In three seconds, this singularity exploded (the Big Bang.) And, withing three minutes, our universe became. How did all matter become so small? We don't know."

We don't know. But somehow we came out of it. The earth and the waters and sun that keep us alive. Here we are, and we are made of stardust. This is no metaphor, though it could be.

We are made of stardust.