Always Remember (For K) Poem by Caroline Lazar

Always remember you are a child of stars.
Science lesson 1:
Every element
that makes you and your world
was born of stardust,
fused through the lifetimes of countless stars,
stars so big they make our sun look puny
(it only fuses hydrogen into helium,
the babies of the periodic table) .
It was slow work, fusing bigger elements in each bigger star,
locking them miser-like in its core.
But in a glorious death-throw super nova
it burst into light and fused the biggest elements of all
then scattered them through the universe.
Every element that makes you and your world
Was born of stardust
So always remember you are a child of stars.

Always remember you are a child of the Earth.
Science lesson 2:
The stardust coalesced
collided from planetoid to planet
until it formed the Earth.
But the new-born Earth
Did not rest peacefully in its cot.
Unstable radioactive elements lost protons,
decaying down the atomic scale.
Volcanoes like we cannot imagine
Spewed rock and gas,
until the stew bubbled into
the building blocks of life.
So always remember you are a child of the Earth

Always remember you are a child of Gaia
The stable life-loving balance of the world
is made by life itself.
The oxygen which you breathe was freed by plants.
Until a Carboniferous world
created a richness we can only imagine,
one you can see buried pell mell in the floor of a coal mine.
So always remember you are a child of Gaia

You are the child of Man and Woman.
Lesson 4: You are the child of Man and Woman.
You have atoms in you which were once
in Einstein, Shakespeare, and your granny.
When they died their bodies decayed,
and released atoms back to the pool
we draw on for our own.
They did not scatter elements like supernovae
but gently sent them back into the world.
Be careful, be aware, Adolf Hitler and Genghis Khan
are in the mix.
But always remember you are a child of Man and Woman.

Always remember who you are -
the child of stars, of Earth, of Gaia and of Man and Woman.