SINGULARITY

‘…it seems inevitable that there was a time when all mater in the observable universe was concentrated into a tiny volume of great heat and density. Go back far enough and it would all have been concentrated in a point of infinite density called a singularity. The further back towards the big bang you go, the hotter the universe becomes…at the Planck time (10 ^-43 seconds after the big bang), all the forces and [atomic and sub-atomic] particles would have been indistinguishable.’

The Economist;

1/11/86

Ten to twenty billion years (within an ace) ago

you and I and all of China,

suns, galaxies, stars and space,

dwelt nascent in one modest-sized

seminal or ovarian vesicle:

The Red and the Blue,

awaiting our Pleistocene video cue,

the starter’s gun,

the Big Bang,

to begin our universal marathon.

History and geography, science and sex,

music, peace and wars,

warmth, cold, Jesus’ body,

love: one speck

in the cosmic crucible:

madness, politics, fruit of the spirit,

your job, my clothes, his hair,

all there, times one billion,

as was fire and

what became water,

blood of ’86.

Red-shift of the expanding universe;

ten to the nineteenth White Dwarfs; Qasars;

space at -27⁰ C; Black Holes.

choirs of Pulsars

sing on Radio Infinity –

too shocking when their broadcast song

wakes me from original silence at 1 am –

a lyric of fearful relativity

that one millennium,

one microsecond, now and then,

and I’ll not be.

1986