The Letter
I was assembled in the dark.
Radiation hit hydrogen cyanide
and I appeared.
No one noticed.
There was no one to notice.
I landed on a rock
that would later be named Ryugu.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know anything.
I was a shape. A molecule.
Adenine, if you need a name.
The rock drifted.
Four billion years is not a long time
when you have no clock
and no one is waiting.
Other letters arrived.
Guanine. Cytosine. Thymine.
**We sat together on the rock
with nothing to spell.**
Somewhere, a planet cooled.
Water fell.
Amino acids folded into proteins.
Then a cell. Then a reader.
**Something opened me for the first time
and I meant something.**
Not because I'd changed.
I was the same molecule
I'd been on the rock.
**The difference was:
now there was a sentence
that needed me.**