Atomic Dreamtime

A fellow amateur poet informed me of this online poetry journal, THE MAKATA (www.dalityapi.com/makata) -- "A Journal of Philippine and International Comtemporary Poetry". They accepted my poem recently and published it in their Issue No. 7, July 2005.

Atomic Dreamtime
What if our existence --
Everything we understand
Or think we comprehend

-- Our universe
Is nothing more than
An atom in a bomb-shell?

Lasting as long
As we freefall

Till we explode
Back into Dreamtime

The poem was inspired by books I read at different times. And it just all came together one day.

In the 1930s, various discoveries showed the atom as a minature universe, dense particles of protons and neutrons surrounded by diffuse cloud of electrons.


Science goes to war: The search for the ultimate weapon, from Greek fire to Star Wars/ Ernest Volkman
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The principle behind the atomic bomb was that in splitting the atom, it released that immense power holding the particles together, thereby producing energies thousands of times greater than that of the sun -- hence the destructive power of the atomic bomb.

Now, what if the entire universe, the galaxies -- life as we know it -- is nothing more than a collection of atomic particles contained within an atomic bomb (or equivalent), free-falling towards a target (whatever it may be)?

Life goes by imperceptably, until the day our sun goes supernova. Our Sun, one of many in the universe has only so much hydrogen to burn and the fate of all stars like the Sun is that once its fuel is spent, it will collapse upon itself and implode -- go supernova.


The wizard of quarks: A fantasy of particle physics/ Robert Gilmore
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When that happens, when the world comes to an end, perhaps that's just how our feeble human minds perceive -- that our universe -- contained within an atomic bomb -- exploding.


Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass/ Lewis Carroll
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Dreamtime: The Australian Aborigines version of a time before creation. In this case I'm referring more to the Lewis Carrol story, where Alice meets the Red King who's dreaming.

Red King says if he was woken up, the world, along with Alice, might just vanish as if it was just a figment of his imagination. Which was similar to a philosophical concept in Sophie's World -- something about Sophie's world disappearing...


Sophie's World: A novel about the history of philosophy/ Jostein Gaarder
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And all the books were borrowed from -- where else? -- the library!

Tag: poetry