It’s All Electric

Whether lush and green,

Dry and dusty under the sun,

The blue of the sea,

The gray and glass of our cities

With their yellow and white striped streets,

Or the geomagnetic field induced

Telluric currents in our Earth

And transiting through the

Depths of the oceans,

It’s all electric.

In spite of each process and thing,

From photons to photosynthesis,

From a thought to a knee jerk,

Seeming so singular

And independent in its individuality,

When you look at them

Far inwardly,

At their ultimate depth,

Their uniqueness breaks down

Into universal similarity

With all matter and energy.

All things…the quick and the dead,

Us, them, and it

Are all electric,

Negative orbiting positive,

Electrons orbiting protons and neutrons

In mostly empty space

In their atoms,

Attracting and repelling themselves

Into molecules,

Valencing into

Animal, vegetable, and mineral,

Solid, liquid, dust, and gas,

Living cells and windblown sand.

Look deeply

Into yourself and me,

And you will see

That we are both

Ten to the billionth power

Positive and negative electric charges,

Repelling when our too-much-alike forces

Encounter each other,

Attracting when we find our differences appealing.

We orbit each other,

Held together by nuclear interactions

Much older than love.

Ancient and powerful,

The electromagnetic forces

That are the essence of all Nature

Swirl within each of us for a lifetime.

Then millions of millennia from now,

When Earth passes,

Our eternal atoms will recycle

Into new stars

Where stellar nucleosynthesis creates

The elements that formed us

Into introspective humans

Who contemplate our existence

And our place as electric beings

Somewhere in the spectrum of spacetime

Between dark emptiness and matter,

From sub-atomic to galactic.