Marie Howe’s Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Which means of Dwelling, in a Beautiful Animated Brief Movie – The Marginalian

UPDATE 2024: This poem is now included in the Universe in Verse guide.

“We, this folks, on a small and lonely planet,” Maya Angelou begins “A Courageous and Startling Reality” — her cosmic wakeup name to humanity, which flew into house aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft and which opened the 2018 Universe in Verse, devoted to our ecological awakening on the wings of Rachel Carson’s brave work.

That 12 months, Marie Howe — one in every of our nice residing poets, who awakens the creaturely conscience of the subsequent era in her ecopoetry class at Sarah Lawrence School — premiered a kindred poem that stilled the group constellating at Pioneer Works earlier than erupting right into a thousand-bodied standing ovation. Whereas impressed by Stephen Hawking (who had simply returned his stardust to the universe a number of weeks earlier) and titled after his trailblazing work on black holes and singularities — work that shines a sidewise gleam on the origin of every part — the poem is at backside a shocking meditation on the interconnectedness of belonging throughout house and time, throughout selves and species, throughout the myriad synthetic unbelongings now we have manufactured as now we have drifted additional and farther from our elemental nature. Its closing line is an invocation, an incantation, ending with a timeless phrase of staggering resonance right this moment: residence.

As we now stand on a profound precipice two years later — dealing with our deeply interconnected ecology of being on this shared cosmic residence as we glance again on fifty years of Earth Day constructed on Carson’s legacy, dealing with essentially the most intimate which means of residence in our remoted shelters scattered throughout this “small and lonely planet” — the poem pulsates with an entire new which means, as all nice poems do within the veins of time.

And so, as a particular deal with for the 2020 Universe in Verse, streaming on April 25 into tens of millions of houses round this sole shared residence, I teamed up with SALT Challenge — a kindred clan of visible storytellers, who’ve gained some hearts and gained some Emmys with their soulful shorts starting from guide trailers to chook migration documentaries — to convey Howe’s “Singularity” to life in a transcendent brief movie, illustrated by paper collage artist Elena Skoreyko Wagner and that includes authentic music by the heroic cellist Zoë Keating, who was current in atoms on the 2018 present when “Singularity” premiered and who additionally composed the rating for “Antidotes to Concern of Dying” — the headlining miracle of a poem for the 2020 present.

It’s with exuberant pleasure and gratitude that I share, as a particular style of the 2020 Universe in Verse, this symphony of magnificence and perspective, over which so many proficient ladies have labored with a lot coronary heart and generosity of spirit .

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe

          (after Stephen Hawking)

Do you generally wish to get up to the singularity
we as soon as have been?

so compact no one
wanted a mattress, or meals or cash —

no one hiding within the faculty lavatory
or residence alone

pulling open the drawer
the place the drugs are stored.

For each atom belonging to me nearly as good
Belongs to you.   Bear in mind?

There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No exams

to find out if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels ache.    Trashed
oceans don’t converse English or Farsi or French;

would that we might get up   to what we have been
— after we have been ocean    and earlier than that

to when sky was earth, and animal was vitality, and rock was
liquid and stars have been house and house was not

in any respect — nothing

earlier than we got here to consider people have been so vital
earlier than this terrible loneliness.

Can molecules recollect it?
what as soon as was?    earlier than something occurred?

No I, no We, nobody. No was
No verb      no noun
solely a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   every part   residence

Complement with an ink-and-watercolor animation of Mojave American poet Natalie Diaz’s beautiful poem of brokenness and belonging and an animated adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s ode to ladies’s prehistoric position within the historical past of the scientific methodology.