The Early Universe and the Children’s Charity Concert
The primordial particles of the universe just after the big bang were repeatedly annihilated by antiparticles, but luckily it ended up after a second or so with very slightly more particles than antiparticles - otherwise there would have been no us and no universe.
1
Created and annihilated,
created and annihilated - what
a waste of time!
said physicist Richard Feynman.
Having won the Nobel Prize he could afford
this enviable aplomb before the stuff of the universe.
He was speaking of those particles and antiparticles
in the early universe
annihilated in explosions of light,
and joking as usual.
2
In the medieval church
we hear children playing their violins
for the refugees of Kosovo;
long hair shines like the sheen
of their violins. They do not know
they are children of that hair’s breadth
victory of particles over antiparticles
in the early universe: annihilation
for all but the few escapers, an eventual
imbalance just enough for making galaxies
and worlds, and at this end of time
these children and the making of their years.
They play Bach and Twinkle little star,
not knowing what a star is,
not knowing the violence of stars,
not knowing they are perfected children
of the violent universe,
not knowing the years piling up
on the scrap heaps of that country
they are raising money for…
the man with his ear sawn off slowly
and fed to a dog like offal, the girl
with her legs torn off after seeing
her family machine gunned, blown
into darkness.
So many annihilations of perfected years.
But also these children alive here
in their panache of light.
Daphne Gloag read Classics and philosophy at Oxford; but she has worked mainly in medical editing and medical journalism, in particular for the British Medical Journal. Her poems have been published in magazines and anthologies, and broadcast on Radio 3; after her retirement a collection entitled Diversities of Silence (1995) was published by Brentham Press. She has recently been awarded first prize in the ‘Poetry on the Lake’ competition in the Orta di San Giulio festival in northern Italy. She is married to poet Peter Williamson.
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