Primordial Soup

Alan Wagstaff

Vast seas of space dust sank and caused the Earth to coalesce.
Some four-point five-four billion years skipped forwards - more or less.

Now, four-point five-four billion bounces lightly off the tongue,
but, written out, the digits show that ‘long’ is really long.

A. For 70 million years the Earth turned - barren as a brick.
Then cloning carbon chains were forged; reactions did the trick.

B. For 30 million years those chains were churned and tossed about,
till some were fused by time and chance and single cells broke out.

C. For 30 million more the cells were driven round the globe.
These dots were bashed and crushed and smashed; they formed a faux microbe.

D. The lifeline took a sudden leap: in just 4 million years
the microbes learned to guzzle gas and fart through proto-rears.

E. Next, vast amounts of time elapsed. You might feel addle-brained:
nine hundred forty million years - then replication reigned.

By now you’re probably confused by summing all this time.
In brief, it took a billion years to cough-up micro-slime.

F. The next epoch’s a real yawn-fest, when scumbags ruled the Earth.
They fringed the shores with gloopy stuff – in regions north of Perth.

A billion-year hiatus burbled on through tedious time.
By Earth’s two-billionth birthday this was ‘Planet of the Slime’.
This might have been life’s pinnacle (some Wags think this is true!)
but Earth turned off the heaters and the saviour ice came through.

G. The Earth was frozen solid and life’s neck was in a noose.
It stayed like this nine million years - but O2 was let loose.

H. The air began to thicken and the Earth began to warm.
The scum learned how to soak-up heat - and life survived the storm.

Now, if you’re going crazy and your brain’s about to crack,
here comes the simple summary, to help you stay on track;
To prep. the stock for life’s grand soup required 2 billion years.
A little more than that, in fact. LIFE NEVER JUST APPEARS.

I. Hurrah for photosynthesis! The scum gained ‘sort-of-leaves’
and dined on sunlight ‘ready-meals’. Now life rolled up its sleeves!
It took 4 hundred-60 million years to make this stick.
It was so very slow that imperceptible seems quick.

J. Eukaryotic cannibals - the first of dog eats dog -
began to scoff each other in that distant sloppy bog.
These single cells were predators – the top-dogs of their days.
They ruled 500 million years and split three separate ways.

K. 6 hundred million years rolled by; these pinpricks made their moves.
Though single-celled, these dots of life fell into different grooves.
The fungi, plants and animals were seeded from these specks.
The three-in-one branched out from here – each limb perfected sex.

At last, the dog of trial and change was really off the leash,
and life began exploiting what it found in every niche.
The chapter ends with three full-stops – which mark the three-toed joint.
Four-fifths of Earth’s account was spent. This is the take-home point!

3.64 billion years is four-fifths of Earth’s lot.
A mere 900 million more leads to the present spot.

The Science

The poem explores the timeline of the emergence of life on Earth from non-life up to the point 900 m years ago when multicellular life began to appear.

The Poet

Alan Wagstaff is a poet and career educator who works internationally to make schooling more humane. He has a particular interest in promoting arts education and uses song and poetry to enliven science learning.

Next poem: Racing by Wiebke Scholz