Go google!

I like to ask my mother ‘Why?’

And ‘How?’ and ‘When?’ and ‘What?’

Sometimes she says she doesn’t know

Or else that she forgot.

I say there’s no excuse for that

You can find out, I bet

If it’s not already in your head

It’s on the Internet!

I wanted to know how many germs

There were on planet earth

(It’s 10 to the power of 30

A nonillion, for what that’s worth)

I thought that it was very cool

To have that kind of fact

I told it to my friends at school

To see how they’d react.

And then I thought I’d like to know

What is the smallest thing?

I asked my Mum to look it up

She’s good at googling

I was quite shocked when she came back

And said that no one knows!

It could be quarks and leptons but…

Maybe something’s smaller than those

Just like the universe expands

As particles come and go

New discoveries every day

Are changing what we know

In olden times, they used to say

We were all separate races

War and slavery were based on

The colour of our faces

Science disproves such ideas

Mum googled some examples

Like we know we’re all related

Thanks to DNA samples.

We found lots of sites explaining how

We all come from stardust

And quite a few my mother said

She really didn’t trust.

There were sites for making money

Losing weight and gaining hair

Some of them were funny

Others gave me quite a scare

So now I don’t rely on google

Each time I need some proof

Because humans put the info there

And they don’t always tell the truth!

2014

Photo description: A drawing by Diek Grobler of the character Mouse with the solar system in the background, from the cover of Seeing Stars, by Deborah Ewing, published by Shuter&Shooter, South Africa.

izithakazelo is the Zulu word for family praise names, which are used in many African cultures to remember and respect family members, living and dead, and to indicate a person’s origins.