I.
Before the birth of space and flame,
No silence yet to hold a name.
There was no breath, no edge, no wall,
No rise, no fall — no time at all.
The clocks lay still in unborn air,
No shadow moved, for none was there.
Not dark, not light, no truth, no lie —
Just unborn thought beneath no sky.
II.
Was there a pulse behind that veil?
A tremble in the quantum tale?
Where nothing stirred, yet might be spun
A billion stars from only one.
Did particles, unsure, collide,
Where laws of physics dare not guide?
And did that void, so empty-seeming,
Begin to echo with the dreaming?
III.
Some say the cosmos sparked from chance,
A dice roll in the vacuum’s dance.
No need for gods to strike the flame —
The game begins without a name.
A ripple in the field, perhaps,
A moment split the endless lapse.
From trembling zero, time began —
Infinity dressed up as man.
IV.
Or was it cycles, great and slow,
Collapse, then birth — an endless flow?
A breath that never truly ends,
Just curves around and re-ascends.
Each age a ripple from the last,
Each future seeded in the past.
And every Big Bang, loud and bright,
A phoenix rising out of night.
V.
But what if time is not so kind?
What if it’s merely how we mind
The ticking laws, the moving flame —
A concept dressed in math’s domain?
Could time itself be just a veil,
A fiction in the thinker’s tale?
If time begins with what we see,
Then what’s before — but “yet to be”?
VI.
The strings may hum beyond our sense,
In branes that stretch through higher tense.
And when they touch — creation spills,
A universe that dreams and wills.
Yet all of this remains unsure,
A myth within a physics cure.
We map the dark, but stars are few,
The deeper truths elude our view.
VII.
What, then, of “nothing” — is it real?
A quiet that no thoughts can feel?
Is nothing something yet unseen,
The mother of the might-have-been?
A cradle made of paradox,
Where voids are doors, not bolted locks.
And through that door, did wonder creep,
To dream the world we wake and sleep?
VIII.
So here we stand — this dust, this breath,
Both close to truth and far from death.
We chart the stars with minds alight,
Still lost between the wrong and right.
But even not-knowing can bloom —
A lantern in the cosmic room.
For in the silence we infer,
The echo of what never were.