Beginning and Becoming
By Chudi Okoye
I. Primordial Chaos
Long before that bold and blazing beginning,
Before the One awoke and conceived creation
There had been only chaos and utter darkness
A lawless void of vast and volatile potential
Where quantum fields danced with phantom force
And the formless deep trembled with restless energy.
II. Theomergence
From the shadowed depths of that dizzied domain,
Following prolonged epochs of primal perturbations
There stirred at last a self-arising Sentience
A sudden spark flaring in the fathomless abyss.
Thus did God emerge
Bursting from the bind of that bottomless chasm.
Seizing hidden patterns in the primeval pulsations
He coded Himself into coherence and consciousness
Becoming Essence amid the mounting disorder.
And in the fullness of His radiant becoming
He pervaded the rowdy realm as Sovereign Will.
At this point, perceiving the potential of creation
His thought turned toward a template.
III. The Singularity
After aeons of this divine contemplation,
His mind fiercely focused on forging order
God gathered the scattered quantum threads.
Stretching across the roiled and boiling void,
With immense power and irresistible authority
He compressed all into an infinitesimal point
And then God said,
“Let there be a Beginning.”
Thus was the singularity created
A kernel of infinite potentiality
Tense and dense with destiny
Core of the coming cosmos
And seed of spacetime.
Within this coil of concentrated chaos,
Hotter than the heart of a thousand suns
God encoded the fundamental constants:
Speed of light, gravity, the quantum rules
And a myriad other cryptic measures
By which the laws of nature would unfold.
Now laden with laws and ready to rupture
The singularity rapidly inflated to a vast expanse
And, in an instant, unleashed a fiery surge
Spewing elementary particles across the void.
Quarks, once restless motes in a seething sea
Were bound by the invisible bonds of gluons
While pions, those flickering couriers of force,
Knitted neutrons and protons into atomic nuclei
To forge the first building blocks of existence.
This, over time, wove the wonders of our world.
IV. Cosmic Evolution
From that fiery first surge, the universe expanded
The singularity, now unbound, had become space
A swelling sea of restless matter and nascent light.
Swift photons sped forth, as heralds of lucid dawn
Enacting God’s pre-coded command:
“Let there be Light!”
The fabric of becoming stretched too rapidly
For photons’ light to lap the celestial expanse
Yet in their wake, darkness yielded to radiance
Revealing a universe in glorious formation.
Hydrogen and helium, the humblest of kin
Gathered by gravity’s lure to forge the first stars.
Amid this, stellar furnaces flared and fused
Creating carbon, oxygen, and heavier elements.
Furious supernovae flung these seeds afar
Scattering matter across the macrocosm
Slowly moulding galaxies, planets, and moons.
Time itself was born, entwined with space
Distance became a measure of memory
And, over the undulating roll of time
A conducive corner of the cosmic vault
Became stage for the flowering of life.
V. Wonder of Life
The wonders of our world would be wasted
If no conscious mind emerged to mark them.
God, being wise, inscribed in the singularity
The photonic code, “Let there be Light!”
A command to illumine the evolving universe
As a visible and intelligible reality.
Another divine algorithm was encrypted
In the same primordial principles of nature
Which majestically decreed:
“Let there be Life!”
A crowning command to be carried out
Through an intimate dance of chance and law
Following a fuller unfoldment of cosmic form.
For millions of millennia this algorithm lay latent
As grand cosmogonic events shaped the stage.
Then in the deep, sun-warmed waters of Earth,
A pale planet in an unprepossessing precinct
The primordial soup was fortuitously stirred
And, with this, the ancient instruction revived.
Within that boiling, once-foiling broth
Arose the delicate wonder of abiogenesis.
Humble RNA, medium of that primal message
Transmitted it in tender, tentative syllables
Until self-copying code, with blind persistence
Conspired with membrane to cradle the cell.
Within this fragile vesicle, the first memory stirred:
A molecule had learned to remake itself!
This, the miracle of molecular replication
Was the hinge, the turn, the holy ground
Where matter crossed from chaos into code.
Now stirred, the planet’s pulse began to quicken
As chemistry courted contingency into complexity.
Molecules multiplied, some flawed, some favored
And in their fortunes, evolution found its formula.
Through aeonian tides of chance and change
Genes arranged, traits emerged, species diverged
From microbe to multicell, from fin to limb
All by the fearsome splendor of natural selection.
VI. Second Emergence
With a prodigious passage of evolutionary time
Through a grand, relentless flourishing of form
Consciousness kindled in creatures of clay
The kind able to contemplate the cosmos
And turn inwards to ponder their purpose.
In these creatures, the circle was at last closed:
A cosmos comprehending through conscious life.
The silent, ancient algorithms of light and life
Awoke within a fragile skull of bone and dream
And found their meaning in a new-made mind.
In this way, humanity auspiciously emerged
A living similitude of that first Sentience:
Self-aware beings able to wonder as they wander
To apprehend the elegant equations of existence
And decode the very laws that shaped their rising.
God vaulted from void into a vaunted mind.
By divine decree and nature’s own signature
Humans, too, emerged from matter into meaning
To become, in their view, the crown of creation.
And now, as titans of the terran cradle
They enhance and hinder the will of nature.
Let there be Light! Let there be Life!
Despite the myriad imperfections of existence
There is purpose in its stubborn persistence.
