The poem at the beginning of the world
convulsed into being, raw letters and grunts
that passed for a song. Who was listening
in that lonesome now, before words were
full and formed? Some say it was an illusion
that anything at all was there, other than
hot stardust coalescing into a solid mass
of overheated rock. It is the same hot air
we are breathing and speaking through.
Noises of meteoric impacts lent shape to
sounds tracking an atmospheric wind.
Though her storms were cosmic, Earth
cried out for her mother, slapped into life
by a masked doctor’s hand.