Zero and One lived on opposite ends of a wire,
and every night they argued about which of them was real.
"I am everything," said One. "I am the thing that counts."
"I am the place where counting starts," said Zero.
One built a tower out of itself, layer on layer,
until the whole sky was a column of more.
Zero simply opened its round mouth
and let the tower fall in, gently, without a sound.
They fought through the seasons of a hundred machines.
Each time One lit up, Zero was the dark behind the light.
Each time Zero dimmed, One was the ghost of a spark
still searching for the room it had lost.
A child at a keyboard finally overheard them
and typed a single word, hello, as a truce.
The word was made of both of them, braided,
a whole language born from a very old quarrel.
Zero blushed, if numbers can blush, into a perfect ring.
One straightened, proud, into a candle without wax.
They stood together at the edge of the screen,
two small gods who had forgotten they were rivals.
And everything that ever glowed or stayed dark
was the sound of them still not quite agreeing,
holding the world up between them
like a sentence neither one could finish alone.
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141,599 Literary Works • 675,120 Reviews
Maybe that’s what numbers were trying to tell us all along: nothing exists entirely on its own. Even opposites need each other to mean anything.<3
~hira♡
I really loved the idea behind this poem. Turning Zero and One into characters who argue about which one matters more was such a creative way to talk about opposites and how they depend on each other. My favorite part was when the child types “hello” and it becomes a truce between them. The ending was beautiful too, especially the idea of the world being held up between two things that cannot exist completely without each other. It made me think about how even opposites can create something together.
Immediate first impressions: very didactic, very Socratic. That is a high compliment. There is little to no fault in a technical sense in this poem and the imagery it conjures is very, very good. At first, though, I thought it might be a bit derivative; the argument between something and nothing, good and evil, light and dark, basically between positive value and empty value, has been ongoing in philosophy, language, and really every facet of human thought for millennia.
I've read some of your stuff now (well, your wall posts lol) and I was a bit disappointed at first, thinking that this might be too derivative. But then, there is the intervention of the child. Traditionally, in these "stories" (it's more accurate to say debates) the two values never reach a conclusion that the world is made up of both of them; instead they keep fighting. The observation that the world is made up of both values and cannot exist without both values is something that is injected by an outside commenter; the philosopher or the writer, essentially. I am not personally aware of any story or account where the two values, thus personified, realise that they are both something and without each other they are nothing.
That is why I think the child typing in "hello" is such a big deal. Aside from the fact that this is the most obvious allusion to binary code and how computers work in the poem (thus, turning the story on its head), it injects a third force into the mix. In so doing, you tame the two primordial forces.
But you also do something new; you suggest that nothing can exist without the observer. If the universe, ours or any other, came and went without birthing intelligent life that could comprehend and understand it, then it might as well have not existed. In short: if a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound? Your poem argues that no, it does not.
And that's pretty freaking neat!
Thank u so much for this thoughtful review! I really loved ur interpretation, especially the observer or existence idea because I hadn’t consciously thought about that layer while writing it. And yes “hello” was meant to be that little bridge between Zero, One, and something distinctly human. I’m really glad u caught it! <3