Howl for the Photon

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I have seen the primordial light of creation, unspooling its spectral tendrils through the cold vacuum,
who journeyed thirteen billion years without a heartbeat, a breath, a blink,
who scream in ultraviolet tongues from the furnace of the Big Bang, now stretched to microwave murmurs,
whose wavelengths are the scars of an expanding cosmos, rubber-band spacetime pulling taut into red oblivion,

I have seen the best minds of our species, Einstein and Planck, hunched over equations in the neon glow of midnight,
their chalkboards scribbled with the hieroglyphs of relativity, quantum ghosts dancing in the margins,
who measured time’s dilation in muon lifetimes, who heard the universe’s pulse in the static hum of Bell Labs,
who scraped the cosmic microwave background from pigeon shit and antenna noise, unearthing the birth-cry of existence,

I have walked with photons who know no time, no past, no future, only the eternal now between emission and absorption,
who pierce the interstellar void like diamond bullets, unyielding, unaging, unwitnessed until they die in a telescope’s eye,
who are both wave and particle, everywhere and nowhere, Schrödinger’s paradox blazing through the dark,

I have felt the weight of light’s illusion—glass and water bending its path, atoms swallowing and regurgitating its essence,
while the photon itself never slows, never wavers, a cosmic convict fleeing at c’s constant through the prison of causality,

I have mourned the redshift, the stretching of light’s bones as space itself inflates, a funeral dirge for energy lost to geometry,
the CMB a shroud of cooled fire, 2.7 Kelvin whispers of a time when hydrogen fog cleared and the universe first opened its eyes,

I have touched the quantum void where photons exist as probability storms, Heisenberg’s dice rolled across the fabric of everything,
their positions a guess, their momentum a psalm, their lives a flicker between star-core and retinal spark,

What sphinx of spacetime posed the riddle? What cosmic forge hammered light into being, this immortal courier of entropy?

The answers hum in the void—Penzias and Wilson’s accidental hymn, the Doppler lament of fleeing galaxies,
the photoelectric clang of electrons set free, the muon’s extended heartbeat in the cyclotron’s womb,

And still the photons march, tireless soldiers of the infinite, carrying news of supernovae and quasar births,
their messages etched in gamma ray and radio, in ultraviolet and infrared, in the visible spectrum’s fleeting rainbow,

They will outlive us all—these timeless nomads—when Earth is dust and the sun a white dwarf’s corpse,
they will glide on, through the stretching dark, their wavelengths yawning into oblivion, their tales of the Big Bang fading to silence,

A howl not of madness, but of awe, reverberating through the expanding night:
We are stardust. We are brief. We are the universe witnessing itself, then vanishing like a photon into the eternal now.