They started off
As nothing more
Than interstellar dust

And then they pulled together
And shone bright in the void

Then they burst
Into a fiery nebula
Of multielemental radiation and dust

And over and over again
They were made and unmade
Beautiful galaxies shining endlessly
In that silent vacuum

And they formed solarities
And became little blobs of magma and gas
And they spun around
Crashing and breaking
Merging and making

Until one day they cooled
And all was calm over the muddy, uniform
Three foot deep sulfuric waves

And one day
They became a red film
But this time
Instead of being made or unmade
They made and unmade themselves

And as they made themselves again
They missed a thread in the genes
And they changed

And over and over
They made these mistakes
But each error they learned from
Each wrong step made them stronger
Each bad guess made them smarter
Each wrong look made them more beautiful

And so they grew
From a film to a blob
From green string to trunks
From swimming rays to Jurassic terrors
From frightened mice
To graceful, awkward, weird-looking, insane, and genius apes

And the time between changes
Kept getting shorter
First coordinated sounds
Then scratched in clay
Then limestone mountains
And one day
They looked around
And realized they had the planet

And as the billenia of the galaxies
Lapsed into the millions of life
Lapsed into the millennia of the young apes
Lapsed into the centuries of the modern species
Will lapse even further

And they looked all around
And they saw this change

And they imagine
And discover
And create
And live

And one day
They will make for themselves
A pair of metal wings
And a tail of pure energy

And they will fly up
And dance amongst the stars