It Must Be An Awkward Life Poem by Ofentse Hajane (The Dark So'tho Seer)

It must be an awkward life.
Not knowing the science of life.
Not knowing that stars are balls of flame,
Producing heat through nuclear fusion at their core.
Not knowing their magnificent distance.
Light-years away.
It must be an awkward life,
To not know where the air we breathe comes from.
To not know it's made up of tiny units called molecules.
Remember at school,
When we were told that air is a mix of oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen,
With tints of ammonia and methane?
Each molecule—composed of even smaller parts—
Atoms.
The master creation of life.
The building blocks that made all we see.
All we are.
All that is, and is to come.
All that you think,
Even the God one beholds to exist.
Life's mystery doesn't end there.
The same material that forms our planet,
And other planets, and their inhabitants,
Can be broken down to even smaller units,
Electrons humbly revolving around the nucleus of the atom.
Break down the nucleus further,
You find protons and neutrons.
And in the vastness of space,
Roughly 15 billion years after the Big Bang,
These elements birthed the spectacles of wonder we behold today.
It must be an awkward life,
Not knowing our universe's world...
...A multiverse.
Even electrons, once thought the smallest,
Are giants to the particles dwelling in the subatomic realm.
Photons—traveling at the speed of light,
Play between dimensions,
Tearing open the time-space continuum theory into a possible reality.
It must be awkward,
To never wonder about black holes,
With forces so intense, they attract all that is.
Even light can't escape their grasp.
And what of the black hole's counterpart?
Creatively named—the white hole.
I need not cite what it does.
It's the yin to the yang.
With such cosmic power,
It's strange not to know—or want to know—of them.
Does it make one awkward,
To not know how the brain works?
The processor of life.
The living computer of the cosmos,
Endowed with trillions of neurons,
Working as one to create a consciousness...
...That is you.
To act.
To feel.
To flee.
That's what your hypophysis is scattered with—
Thoughts, made of energy.
Electromagnetic pulses flowing freely.
It must be totally awkward,
To not know that all that is, and all that's to come, is energy.
A consciousness—manifesting itself in many characters—
That is you... and me.
It must be really awkward,
To dwell upon fairy tales,
That all arose from a being of super-divinity.
An illusion.
A cage for the mind.
After all...
It must be awkward,
That so few of us are in search of truth,
Reality,
Knowledge,
Love,
Peace,
Harmony,
Equality,
Balance.
After all,
I'm just an African.
Who wishes for truth and peace
To roam through logic and reason.
It must be awkward...
To not want to know the truth,
To not want to be the truth.
Yes.
It must be an awkward life indeed.

By O.M Hajane (The Dark So'tho Seer)