Star Stuff

Though my soul may set in darkness,
it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.
~Sarah Williams

I've experimented before with poems made out of speeches or novels. This time I used something that Cosmos' Neil deGrasse Tyson said:

Origins (a found poem)
Neil deGrasse Tyson

There is
a fundamental reason
why we look at the sky
with wonder
and longing—

for the same reason
that we stand,
hour after hour,
gazing at the distant swell
of the open ocean.

There is
something like an ancient wisdom,
encoded and tucked away in our DNA,
that knows its point of origin
as surely as a salmon knows its creek.

Intellectually,
we may not want to return there,
but the genes know,
and long for their origins—
their home in the salty depths.

But if the seas
are our immediate source,
the penultimate source
is certainly the heavens…
The spectacular truth is—

and this is something
that your DNA has known all along—
the very atoms of your body—
the iron, calcium, phosphorus,
carbon, nitrogen, oxygen,

and on and on—
were initially forged
in long-dead stars.
This is why,
when you stand outside

under a moonless, country sky,
you feel some ineffable tugging
at your innards.
We are star stuff.
Keep looking up.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
photo by Bruce Press

Katya at Write.Sketch.Repeat. is the Poetry Friday host today.

Addendum: I'm sorry, I didn't make it clear that I didn't change Mr. Tyson's words. That is what he said -- I just added the line breaks so we could look at it a different way and spend time with it as a poem.