I was reading the announcement of an element discovered

with a half-life older than the universe.

Even from God’s point of view,

that must surely pass pretty slowly;

enough for us down here to use words like ‘forever’,

as in ‘I will love you forever’,

since no-one has, as yet, worked out the formula

for love’s half-life; although, surely, a time must come

when even the most combustible love burns out.  But then,

I was also reading about a computer so powerful

it could solve a problem that would take ordinary computers

more time than the universe has existed to solve. 

What sort of problem, I wondered, would that be? 

What kind of computations would be churning away

while stars gathered and burst, what would be going on

in those tubes and wires while tides of light flooded

and ebbed on time’s pebbly reaches? 

And what if other elements, still to be discovered,

have a half-life that is slower still?

Perhaps when we say ‘the soul is immortal’

we mean the soul is an element

that haunts the extremities of the table of elements,

spirals and fractals of chance and fate slowly flowing

out toward the frames of existence; perhaps

a soul’s half-life would take that long to dissolve

or to solve.

​

Ionosphere Jan 2026