This whole life.
I know it's nothing;
it's small, almost insignificant:
like a ribosome,
I'm just reading the information,
passing it along.
This whole earth;
it's just some cell,
just one little cell
that makes up a whole vast body.
But it's terribly important that I be,
I affect things;
I move others,
and I am moved by them.
We're all just doing our part,
and yet the play,
or the dance,
is so vast and complex
that it could go on just fine
without me:
or us.
Our sweet, beautiful, blue orb:
it could go on,
keep shining,
host to what we are doing
right now.
But--
if we blow it all, well,
the angels in that eternal realm
will sing some horribly moving requiem
to our tragic winking out.
There's no time--
I'm really just space
and my hideous little human drama,
it's just a movement,
it affects--
and it seems so terribly important:
what I am doing,
my soul-building,
my information processing,
the relationships I am forming,
the music and the art
that I am making...
seems very important to the 'grand scheme'...
but the cosmos is so vast and violent
and moves according to its own direction,
that my being alive may not amount
to much more than I existed,
and died,
and others came to be important or moved
by my interacting with them;
and we all died:
a heady swell flaring up
by this bright sun
and then were extinguished,
our mass contributing
to some organ or tissue
the cosmos needed to breathe with,
or digest.