Who Are You?

Ever so Quiet in my Plenitude


For eons I was beyond observation,
beyond instrumentation,
beyond the conjuring of magicians.

I was the binding,
sitting at some constant number everywhere,
the unheard background song,

ever so quiet in my plenitude.

I was never seen, never detected,
beyond consciousness.
I was beyond knowledge, beyond understanding.

And then I was inferred, hypothesized,
my seeming absence noticed,
the possibility of me a question, a challenge,

ever so puzzling in my quiet.

Searchers came, writing equations,
probing past the limits of science,
head-butting the unsolvable,

believing without evidence.
Skeptics disputed.
Decades passed, a blink in time,

none of it touching me.

I am a field, ever-present
at every point in the universe:
empty space is full of me.

My boson vibrates within me.
I make it possible
for elementary particles to have mass,

ever so quiet in my plenitude.

I provide a medium
through which particles move,
affecting their properties along the way.

Without me the universe
would be utterly different:
nothing would exist as you know it,

you would not exist.

Finally, an observation
by the Large Hadron Collider,
my song discovered,

my puzzle opened:
I had to exist and so I existed
as I had always existed,

ever so quiet in my plenitude.