Like a number of my poems, this one focuses on a biblical scene, the creation story. If you look at the story from one point of view, you find it not dissimilar to how we view the world, starting with a big bang of light. The creation of planets and of water are perhaps reversed, as are the order of the stars before the earth. But then we get plants. Then fishes in the seas, birds in the sky, later mammals. OK, they should have had reptiles before birds. And finally, man. It looks sort of "early" scientific.

In the Bible, God is brooding over the darkness. How would that feel? Sensory deprivation does terrible things to human beings - could it be even harder for a unique being, no senses and no other person existing? As a scientist, there is nothing that requires a God to exist before (or after) the creation of the universe through the big bang. Indeed, since the big bang marks the creation of space-time, the concept of "before" is as slippery as finding proof of God. What is before if time does not exist "then". Some of the lines in Breathe are equally non-existent - if there is no space (or space-time) and no earth, there is no gravity and you cannot be "falling alone through limitless space". Are we just "the imagination of God?" 

Technically, I needed that insistent drumbeat of "Blackness" to make this work, at the start of each "verse" and on the 4th line. The rhythm owes a lot to waltz time, but I'm not precious about it - there are places that 1-2-3 is replaced by a 1-2 or a 1-2. More important is the second part of each "verse" where the four lines wind down in length to just a short phrase. I call them "verses" because they are a structural repeating unit, but I didn't put a blank line to separate them, and if you were reading it out loud, you would pause only for the same length you would any full stop.

The rhyme scheme is simple: Blackness - A - B - Blackness - A - C - C - B. 3 couplets and a drone.