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Edited by Dava Sobel
It’s been a billion years since blue green algae sequined lakes and—like a python swallowing a pig—a protist ate one. I see that pale hunter orbiting gloomy coves tail whipping mellow waters, then guzzling a necklace of cyanobacteria— awareness tuned only to that earthen, exquisite taste not knowing that algae eat sunlight and pluck electric arcs from water exhaling long tongues of odorless oxygen that suffocate anaerobes all over this earth. It waits for its meal to die. But one green bloom burns on inside, spits flame, survives. Night ebbs, day breaks And now the protist feels pregnant with a tiny sun god. Together they tumble over the ocean drunk with the liquors of light each trying to cough up the other to be alone again and just float sated. Hundreds of millions of years of wrestling until the captive, now a chloroplast packed with pigments, is fully formed and engineers a biosphere: A garden in the east, just shy of Eden an apple, another reckless bite, exile across the jeweled earth
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