Finding My True Place In The End

Take a deep breath, at least one of the molecules entering your lungs came from Caesar's last breath. Enrico Fermi

There will still be a place for me amid the inorganic and the inanimate

Taking part in the complex cycles of the atmosphere here on earth

Cycling with the moon as she waxes and she wanes

Flowing with the tides in steady and peaceful respirations

Falling with the gentle rain from clouds of mist above the valleys

Crashing on a rocky shore with no one there to see

Carried upon the wind that always blows across the southern ocean

Inhaled by the plants in one form and respired in another

Circulating deep within the ocean around the globe for many centuries

Exposed with the dancing motes of dust backlit by a shaft of sunlight

Thrust up with the mountains built during vast tectonic plate collisions

Flowing with many different rivers through long inter-glacial epochs

Glowing with the northern lights in the star-filled Antarctic sky

Part of me in the rolling dawn and sunset that travel around the world

Ingested by the plant eaters and left behind to nourish wildflowers

Breathed in by living organisms to become part of them as well

Reacting in the upper atmosphere with the sunlight that sustains

Escaping into the quieter reaches where the planet’s gravity is not measured

Subducted down below the earth’s crust to flow up again with the liquid magma

Part of some few molecules in certain raindrops of every passing storm

Refracted briefly in a rainbow visible from one empty spot on the desert floor

Locked for centuries in the bogs or for millennia in coal deposits

Merging with the sun when it grows to claim us in its old age

Rippled by the passing of the cosmic background energy

Falling as snow and merging with the icecap for a thousand centuries

Rising with the smoke of countless burning fires

Riding with the earth around the sun, through the milky way, across the universe

Part of the biology of your sorrow and the chemicals released in your laughter

In one layer of stone finally exposed once more to the morning’s light

Helping conduct the voices of the birds and the calling of the insects

Freezing up as winter darkens, gliding down with the falling leaves

Blind chemicals from me reacting in someone’s creation of a work of genius

Consciousless but swirling, in those patterns perceived only by the living

Busy with the cycles of the inorganic and the radiations of the life force

Part of me was part of them and will be part of you as well as all of this