Singularity: Poet Marie Howe’s Beautiful Tribute to Stephen Hawking and Our Belonging to the Universe

UPDATE: The poem, one of the most beloved and widely shared in all years of The Universe in Verse, has now been turned into a breathtaking animated short film and inspired a young poet’s stirring response.

When Stephen Hawking (January 8, 1942–March 14, 2018) was a young man, having already outlived the prognosis he had been given with ALS, he built on earlier theories about what happens to a dying star as it collapses to form a singularity — that tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the heart of a black hole. But then Hawking did something radical — he took this final death-stage and flipped the arrow of time to consider what would happen if that singularity exploded outward and began expanding. He theorized that perhaps that is how the universe was born. So began his half-century intellectual adventure that shaped the course of modern physics and changed our common understanding of why everything that is is.

A crowning moment of the 2018 Universe in Verse was a tribute to Hawking’s legacy by one of the great poets of our time: Marie Howe. Because Howe is an artist extremely considered in what she releases into the world, often devoting a decade to a single poem, it was a tremendous honor to have her premiere a new poem composed for the occasion in a blink of cosmic time and inspired by her young daughter’s love of physics. Howe’s prefatory meditations are as magnificent and full of wisdom as the poem itself — please enjoy both:

SINGULARITY

by Marie Howe (after Stephen Hawking) Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity

we once were? so compact nobody

needed a bed, or food or money — nobody hiding in the school bathroom

or home alone pulling open the drawer

where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good

Belongs to you. Remember? There was no Nature. No

them. No tests to determine if the elephant

grieves her calf or if the coral reef feels pain. Trashed

oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French; would that we could wake up to what we were

— when we were ocean and before that to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was

liquid and stars were space and space was not at all — nothing before we came to believe humans were so important

before this awful loneliness. Can molecules recall it?

what once was? before anything happened? No I, no We, no one. No was

No verb no noun

only a tiny tiny dot brimming with is is is is is All everything home

For more highlights from The Universe in Verse, savor Janna Levin reading Maya Angelou’s cosmic clarion call to humanity inspired by Carl Sagan, Jane Hirshfield’s poem “Optimism” in a lovely papercraft stop-motion animation by Kelli Anderson, and America Ferrera reading Denise Levertov’s poem about our conflicted relationship with nature, then revisit Hawking on the meaning of the universe.