The Greatest Show On Earth

1.) Four Point Six

Archaean horizon
The first sunrise
On a pristine Gaea
Opus perfectum
Somewhere there, us sleeping.

2.) Life

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries
We have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet
Sparkling with color, bountiful with life
Within decades we must close our eyes again
Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time
In the sun, to work at understanding the universe
And how we have come to wake up in it?

The cosmic law of gravity
Pulled the newborns around a fire
A careless, cold infinity in every vast direction
Lonely farer in the Goldilocks zone
She has a tale to tell
From the stellar nursery into a carbon feast
Enter LUCA.

The tapestry of chemistry
There's a writing in the garden
Leading us to the Mother of all.

We are one
We are a universe
Forbears of what will be
Scions of the Devonian sea
Aeons pass
Writing the tale of us all
A day-to-day new opening
For the greatest show on Earth.

Ion channels welcoming the outside world
To the stuff of stars
Bedding the tree of a biological holy
Enter life.

We are here to care for the garden
The wonder of birth
Of every form most beautiful.

3.) The Toolmaker

After a billion years
The show is still here
Not a single one of your fathers died young
The handy travelers
Out of Africa
Little Lucy of the Afar.

Gave birth to fantasy
To idolatry
To self-destructive weaponry
Enter the god of gaps
Deep within the past
Atavistic dread of the hunted.

Enter Ionia, the cradle of thought
The architecture of understanding
The human lust to feel so exceptional
To rule the Earth.

Hunger for shiny rocks
For giant mushroom clouds
The will to do just as you'd be done by
Enter history, the grand finale
Enter Ratkind.

Man, he took his time in the sun
Had a dream to understand
A single grain of sand
He gave birth to poetry
But one day'll cease to be
Greet the last light of the library.

We were here!
We were here!
We were here!
We were here!

4.) The Understanding

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones
Most people are never going to die because
They are never going to be born
The potential people who could have been
Here in my place but who will in fact never see
The light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara
Certainly those unborn ghosts include
Greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.

We know this because the set of possible people
Allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set
Of actual people. In the teeth of those stupefying
Odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here
We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds
How dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior
State from which the vast majority have never stirred?

5.) Sea-Worn Driftwood

There is grandeur in this view of life
With its several powers, having been
Originally breathed into a few forms or into one
And that whilst this planet has gone cycling on
According to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple
A beginning endless forms most beautiful
And most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.