Asterisks

Asterisks

To my mind, at least,
For all their charms,
A starfish only has five arms –
Or fewer, I guess – the occasional fours –
Those species (or mutants ?) from stranger shores.
And then there are those that have been in the wars,
And still clearly lack what they’ve yet to grow back.
But more than five, at least to me,
Must clearly be a sea-star, see ?
Now, I have no idea how far or near they are,
The -fish and -star –
If species with x-number limbs displayed
Are brothers-in-arms within a clade ?-
Or whether an extra arm or three
Is all within the family ?
But since the urchins are based on fives,
And brittles and dollars and cucumbers too,
It does seem like the higher numbers are the lives with something new.

But when you tell me not to call them
(Any of them) as starfish,
I’m sorry, I cannot grant your wish.
You claim that they ain’t fish in fact,
They broke off from the stem before
The backbone got I on the act.
But what the hell ?  There’s plenty more,
Like jelly-, silver- and shell-fish by the score,
Which are even further from the core !
The word is Anglo-Saxon
And it simply meant a creature from the sea,
But now you claim the taxon
Is whatever you decide that it must be.
And then you say that we are fish as well,
It’s in our genes, you tell –
Well yes, but then the fishy way you preach
Is stinking up your speech.
I know that I’m a vertebrate –
That I am closer to a lungfish
Than a lungfish is to any trout.
But that’s not what I’m on about –
It’s not the science that I hate,
But how you cannot separate
The mathematic from the ev’ryday.
So would you really try to ban the lot ?
The sea-horse is no horse, you say.
(The hippopotamus is not
A real river-horse, of course –
But that’s in Greek, so seemingly okay.)

You want me to favour the sea-star for starfish,
So even the fives will henceforth be
Now sea-stars in perpetuity.
But that still makes no sense to me –
They may not be strictly fishes like we are,
But stranger by far to name them after a star !