Bones need to be clothed
usually with flesh (muscles, sinews, skin)
but sometimes with myth, legends, stories.
We are the humans, the story-tellers. Let
the story commence
These are the atoms of which I am made; these
are the atoms of which the enslaved were made.
The atoms of which we are made come from the stars
Scourged to our atoms; re-built
After the Big Bang, tiny particles bound together to form hydrogen and helium. As time went on, young stars formed when clouds of gas and dust gathered under the effect of gravity, heating up as they became denser. At the stars’ cores, bathed in temperatures of over 10 million degrees C, hydrogen and then helium nuclei fused to form heavier elements. A reaction known as nucleosynthesis.
This reaction continues in stars today as lighter elements are converted into heavier ones. Relatively young stars like our Sun convert hydrogen to produce helium, just like the first stars of our universe. Once they run out of hydrogen, they begin to transform helium into beryllium and carbon. As these heavier nuclei are produced, they too are burnt inside stars to synthesise heavier and heavier elements. Different sized stars play host to different fusion reactions, eventually forming everything from oxygen to iron.
During a supernova, when a massive star explodes at the end of its life, the resulting high energy environment enables the creation of some of the heaviest elements including iron and nickel. The explosion also disperses the different elements across the universe, scattering the stardust which now makes up planets including Earth.
Let the stars sing in our bones
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| from 'Akan Traditions of Origin/Eva LR Meyerwitz/Faber & Faber 1952 |
Ralph Hoyte