Before there was anything No light and no dark No distance to measure Between imagined points There was a silence so complete It did not even know itself No ticking of time Because time had not been given permission to flow No emptiness either For even emptiness requires a stage upon which to stretch There was only a condition beyond description A held breath without a breather Then without warning Without cause The stillness broke Not an explosion But an eruption of space A seed of existence Smaller than thought Hotter than any fire that would ever burn Unfolding in an instant The first instant Time flickered into being And space rushed outward Carrying that newborn moment In every direction all at once In that first fraction of a second The universe expanded faster than imagination A wild inflation A cosmic bloom Energy surged and churned A blinding ocean without shores The laws that would govern everything Crystallized out of chaos Like frost forming on invisible glass Gravity's pull Light's speed The quiet arithmetic of the universe From nothing we can describe Came everything we have ever known From a spark beyond comprehension Came all structure All beauty All possibility As the universe stretched it cooled The furious brilliance softened Just enough for the first building blocks to take shape Quarks binding into protons and neutrons Tiny knots in the fabric of energy Minutes later Mere heartbeats in cosmic terms Joined into the simplest nuclei Hydrogen. Helium. Whispers of lithium. The universe once an unbroken blaze Began to compose itself Yet light itself was still trapped Entangled in a dense fog of charged particles The cosmos was a glowing veil Radiant but opaque Like a lantern wrapped in thick cloth Hundreds of thousands of years passed Then as if a curtain were gently drawn aside Electrons found their partners Atoms formed The fog lifted Light at last unshackled Streamed freely across the widening expanse That ancient light still travels today A faint echo A cooling memory of the universe's first glow Gravity patient and persistent Began its quiet work Gathering the thin gas into vast slow eddies For millions of years these clouds collapsed inward Then The first stars ignited Brilliant furnaces Forging heavier elements in their cores Scattering seeds Carbon for life. Oxygen for breath. Iron for blood and stone. Galaxies spun into existence Great spirals and clustered swarms Each one a city of stars And all of it traces back to that first moment The birth of time itself Even now the universe continues to expand Stretching the fabric woven in that primordial instant The echo of the beginning still hums.
