Science  Write  Now

The moon is a child of collision

Born 4.5 billion years ago

The result of a violent union between our earth and what we call a ‘wandering ‘planet

How curious to describe an entire planet

With the same term we might employ for a 20-something student on a gap year

aimlessly making their way through Europe

When the errant, gap year planet

Collided with the dead rock we would one day call home

It resulted in a cataclysmic collision that sent

Matter flying into space

Until it cooled

Coalesced

Compressed

And became the subject of innumerable poems (like this one)

The heart of myriad metaphors for everything from the waxing and waning of love

To madness and menses

Lycanthropy and envy

As children

Our first collisions are between face and floor

fingers and door

table and jaw

Through this series of collisions

We learn to walk

To gradually master the process of feet colliding with earth

at the desired pace and intensity

Colliding intentionally

In the way that we meant them to, eventually

In making new humans we also collide

Flesh against flesh

Furiously

 frenetically

Heads heady under the allure of pheromones

And hormones

And the desire to not be alone

As the biological impulse to continue the species

Firmly grasps the wheel of our psyche

Under the ingenious camouflage of lust

The act of collision is also an act of discovery

It was the collision of two black holes

One billion years ago

That confirmed the existence of gravitational waves

Granting us a new sense with which to study the universe

In physics, collision is the violent, beating heart of discovery

The collision of particles

Results in momentous waves of data

Whispering the secrets of the sub-atomic universe

4.5 billion years from now

Long after the carbon in our bodies has undergone countless transformations and reformations

The milky way, our home, will collide with the Andromeda galaxy

We know this with great certainty

Even though we can’t tell for sure what the weather will do in a few days

Or what the stock market will do in a few hours

Or what our own children will do in the next few seconds

We know that these two galaxies,

each containing unfathomably large clusters of stars and planets and moons

will eventually collide

their great spiraling arms embracing one another

it is unlikely that any two single stars will impact

instead the two galaxies will merge and become one united body

of incomprehensible size and scale

a vast, cosmic child born of collision