The First Syllable explodes -

‘…Or disappear/ Into the grass-blade atom – one flare/ Annihilating the world/ To the big-eyed, simple light that fled/ When the first word lumped out of the flint.’ Ted Hughes, ORTS, 7 Poets
‘Was it light that spake from the darkness, or music that shone from the word,/ When the night was enkindled with sound of the sun or the first-born bird?’ Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1837-1928, Ode to Music

The First Syllable explodes -

The first syllable explodes,
among hot, broken stars -

blown black mouth
of perpetual night -

bursting forth -
flowering gases,

gasping hydrogen,
ecstatic elements -

mysterious holy germs
blooming to first light.

Word in darkness
now sounding -

speaking music -
articulating means;

dancing matter
to life, pliancy -

culmination, beginning
of love’s practical verse.


‘The filament of DNA is information, a message written in a code of chemicals, one chemical for each letter. It is almost too good to be true, but the code turns out to be written in a way that we can understand. Just like written English, the genetic code is a linear language, written in a straight line…it is digital, in that every letter bears the same importance. Moreover, the language of DNA is considerably simpler than English, since it has an alphabet of only four letters, conventionally known as A, C, G and T… how few people even guessed such a possibility. For the first half of the twentieth century, one question reverberated unanswered through biology: what is a gene? It seemed almost impossibly mysterious.’ Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Fourth Estate, 2000