With Regards to Mr. Tyson

The most astounding fact I ever learned in science class was that hydrogen,

given time, will begin to ask questions like:

Where did I come from?

Where am I going?

What am I doing here?

What's the point of getting out of bed in the morning?

Well my take is that the very first thing that ever happened

was a great big CRASH like the spark of a match

that burned brighter than the hope of two people trying to make a third

louder than every scream or sigh or story or song that you ever heard

and it still burns.

and when that white-hot shaking settled,

cooled like quivering fresh-forged metal,

slowed down and solidified it dressed itself in protons--

protons, like that girl from the first day of science class

who turned around in her seat and asked

"Can I borrow your notes? Did you catch that?"

and me, I'm like an electron, opposite in every way

but doomed to fall around this girl like the moon falls around our world

and all I can manage to stammer out is a pitiful "y-yeah."

but you get a proton and an electron together you make hydrogen,

and with enough hydrogen it'll all fall in on itself

until all that heat and all that pressure make two of them fit together

and FWOOSH the rest follow suit, a wildfire inspiration

in a star, a thermonuclear crucible, an intergalactic philosopher's stone

turning hydrogen into gold-- an alchemist's wet dream!

but it was the astronomer who saw and knew and never told.

Because two hydrogen make helium, then lithium,

beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen--

breathe in oxygen breathe out that same air

that you and I breathe used to be hydrogen just like you and me

and like a pregnant woman that's grown too fat

and can't support the mass of her ravenous babies

a star that's grown too heavy will collapse

and send her enriched guts throughout the cosmos

to make new stars, new planets, new rocks covered in carbon and nitrogen--

water, that's just O and H2, throw in some C and some N and you get a stew

and given time that stew will learn to crawl and walk and breathe

and talk and dream and screw and be just like me and you

so yeah, we're in this universe but it's in us too--

That's why we're here! That's why we exist!

to recognize and experience the brilliance that's within us and around us.

I wasn't lying when I told that girl I saw galaxies spinning in her eyes

and I'm not lying when I say: when you send me flying

off into the void, I won't be going on some lonesome, heroic voyage.

I won't be alone.

I'll be going home.