I remember first hearing rumors
of the atom. We are all made up
of crumbs, Q told me
when we were kids. In those days,
nature’s magic tricks were still
mysteries to us, secrets we sought
to unravel: how astronauts float
in outer space, how leaves turn from green
to gold, how the sea becomes the clouds
and the clouds become the sea.
Q’s mom was a scientist
who worked in a research lab
and conducted experiments with worms.
We pulled threads from her
spools of knowledge,
cut lengths of different colors,
and, with them, tried to stitch together
the universe. Atoms, Q said:
they’re what you’d end up with if
you cut yourself in half
then cut one of your halves in half
then one of those halves in half
and so on and so on until
you couldn’t cut yourself into
any smaller pieces. Nobody has ever
seen one before. It’s impossible, but
one day, when we grow up,
we will find a way. Turns out,
we are not so different
from the grass or rocks
or laces in our shoes,
all composed of inconceivable
numbers of atoms. In each of us alone,
there are billions of billions
of billions of them, more than
there have been seconds in all of history.
The revelations to the magic tricks
were magic themselves, as if,
when Toto pulled back the curtain
in the Emerald City, the Wizard
was not a fraud but rather
even more magnificent
than imagined. Back then,
it made perfect sense to us,
that by piecing together
these atomic LEGOs,
we could create anything
and everything we dreamed of:
castles and bikes and narwhals
and sugar and moons.
And dream we did
beneath the sky
as limitless and star-studded
as our imaginations.

poetry-magazineElementary Magic

Elementary Magic