Evolution by Linda Bierds

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend February 11, 2016   Evolution   Linda Bierds

How, Alan Turing thought, does the soft-walled, jellied, symmetrical cell become the asymmetrical horse? It was just before dusk, the sun’s last shafts doubling the fence posts, all the dark mares on their dark shadows. It was just after Schrodinger’s What is Life, not long before Watson, Franklin, Crick, not long before supper. How does a chemical soup, he asked, give rise to a biological pattern? And how does a pattern shift, an outer ear gradually slough its fur, or a shorebird’s stubby beak sharpen toward the trout? He was halfway between the War’s last enigmas and the cyanide apple—two bites— that would kill him. Halfway along the taut wires that hummed between crime and pardon, indecency and privacy. How do solutions, chemical, personal, stable, unstable, harden into shapes? And how do shapes break? What slips a micro-fissure across a lightless cell, until time and matter double their easy bickering? God? Chance? A chemical shudder? He was happy and not, tired and not, humming a bit with the fence wires. How does a germ split to a self? And what is a—We are not our acts and remembrances, Schrodinger wrote. Should something— God, chance, a chemical shudder?— sever us from all we have been, still it would not kill us. It was just before dusk, his segment of earth slowly ticking toward night. Like time, he thought, we are almost erased by rotation, as the dark, symmetrical planet lifts its asymmetrical cargo up to the sunset:  horses, ryegrass— In no case, then, is there a loss of personal existence to deplore— marten, whitethroat, blackbird, lark—nor will there ever be.            Copyright © 2016 Linda Bierds. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Three years ago, while living in London, I saw an exhibition at the Science Museum on Alan Turing’s life—his work as a decoder in World War II, his persecution as a homosexual, his death by cyanide at forty-four. Although the focus of Turing’s work was not evolution, he did ask how the symmetrical cell could become the asymmetrical being. When I found myself asking similar questions about Turing’s personal evolution, my poem took shape.” —Linda Bierds   Linda Bierds’s most recent book is Roget’s Illusion (Marian Wood Books, 2014).  She teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle and lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington. Poetry by Bierds   Roget’s Illusion (Marian Wood Books, 2014) "After the Grand Perhaps" by Lucie Brock-Broido "Darwin's Finches" by Deborah Digges "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038