In these Grains of Our Existence

 

We are all made of stardust–

the signs are everywhere.

For four and a half billion years

floating on this spatial sea,

collecting bits of every planet that ever existed, 

every sun that no longer shines.

Quantum and classic physics aside,

deciphering our place on a finite line 

in an infinite universe boggles

even the sharpest of minds.  

Even our atoms resemble tiny solar systems.

and the elements that compose our human body

are also found inside the stars.

Made of stardust? You bet we are.

We are a miracle of evolution,

breathing the air from plants 

that existed a hundred million years ago.

We need not question who we are.

It is in everything that surrounds us.

All of us travelers in time

 walking among the stars.

© Ginny Brannan 2024

The grains of sand at Hoshizuna-no-Hamma beach in Okinawa, Japan are shaped like tiny stars. The star-shaped “sand” grains in Okinawa are actually the calcite endoskeletons of microscopic organisms known as Foraminifera.  Foraminifera are a quite old phylum, having been around since at least the Cambrian era (over 500 million years ago), 

Coloring Outside the Lines

 

I‘d never put my work up with the classics,

I wallow somewhere in obscurity.

How often have I struggled with my formats

 and lines that run into infinity ........

And meter’s so restrictive in its confines

while free verse struggles hard to find the ‘end’

and style’s but a word that’s used to define

the voice the writer chooses to extend.

Shakespeare had a knack for writing sonnets,

Dickinson wrote quatrains in slant rhyme;

Poe tiptoed on the edge of the ‘demonic’

while Frost wrote of a kinder, gentler time—

and my ideas drop scattered and chaotic

  another would-be poet tweaking lines.

 

© Ginny Brannan 2024