All moments are lost, all moments are found

First there was the Word

and the word was Bang!

And what was dark

and absent became light.

An infinite nothingness

Instantly becoming an

Infinite everythingness.

As it ever was and ever

shall be. As far as we know.

Every particle is simultaneously

a wave. An ephemeral instant

that switches from one to the other

as soon as you look at it.

Or when God rolls over when

the cat jumps up on the bed.

It is said that the human brain

is the most complex structure

in the known universe,

eighty-six billion neurons

with more than a hundred trillion

points of connection.

But before all that, before poetry,

music, or rocket science. Before

Genghis Khan or Shakespeare

or I love Lucy stuffing bon bons

into her mouth when she can’t

keep up with the conveyor belt,

was the first mass extinction,

the Great Oxygenation Event,

when too much oxygen killed off

most of the life on this planet.

An ice encased globe with no

surface water. Snowball Earth.

Then came the Cambrian Explosion,

when complex multi-cellular life evolved

and then the advent of the so-called

Big Five Mass Extinctions:

Late Ordovician, Late Devonian,

Permian-Triassic, Triassic-Jurassic

and the one we talk about most,

the Cretaceous-Paleocene,

when the Chixulub impactor

smacked into the Yucatan

and killed off the dinosaurs.

(Except for the ones

ancestral to birds).

Moments captured in stone

and chromosomes. We still have

the same basic anatomical plan

for bones as fish and salamanders.

Now, in what some call the Anthropocene,

the Age of Humans, we've made moments

that will live forever in the electromagnetic

energy flowing out into the cosmos.

All the curses and prayers,

Rocky and Bullwinkle. Howdy Doody,

Ghandi and Elvis. Rush Limbaugh,

Obama, Kennedy, Cronkite.

Commercials for toilet paper

and lizards selling auto insurance.

Beatles and Beethoven. Ricky telling

Lucy, you got some ’splaing to do.