Category: Evolution, Medical, & Chemistry

Dürer’s-Rhino Syndrome

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The Rhinoceros by Albrecht Dürer, though don’t ask me if it’s the right way round.

Dürer’s-Rhino Syndrome

Toothy-mawed pteranodon,
A stegosaur who drags its tail,
Old T-Rex with no feathers on,
Dimetrodon with a humpy sail –
However much they’re wrong,
At least they never hem or hedge –
They’re always big and bold and cutting edge !

Pity the paleo-artists
Who bring these skeletons to life,
Who are the public midwife
To a thousand playground dreams –
No sooner have they started,
When a fossil or a paper
Is transforming facts to vapour
And is picking at the seams.

One day, in a century,
They’ll laugh at our sauropods
For not swimming in the sea –
No wonder how they look so odd…
No matter how carefully
We draw iguanodon his thumb,
We are the Crystal Palace beasts to come.

Pity the paleo-artists,
Their work is only for today –
For if they don’t give way,
Then their errors just persist.
But don’t be brash or heartless –
Their legacy is in the seeds
That captures, stimulates, and feeds
Each future dino-tologist.

Crystal Palace Iguanadons, sculpted by Benjamin Hawkins, photographed by Jes

Slow Poke

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Slow Poke

Never drop your tardigrade in alcohol or acid, when
It isn’t curled-up tightly like a bun.
Never dehydrate it, or stop its oxygen,
Until all of its shrivelling is done.
Never heat your tardigrade a hundred-plus degrees,
Or blast it with a gamma ray, or leave it out to freeze,
Or send it into space, or in a pressure fit to squeeze –
Unless it is a hibernating tun.
If it’s slowly, slowly moving,
Prob’ly best to leave it be –
For now is not the time for proving
Indestructibility.
For a tardy’s only hardy
When its legs no longer run…
But if it’s small and in a ball ?
Then sure, go have some fun.

London Pebble

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London Pebble

I found a fossil in the park today –
An ammonite in iron grey,
Hardly rare, this type of fare,
They get found in their scores –
They all died by their millions
Till they died with the dinosaurs.

But all the rock round here today
Is built on London Clay –
On the scene in the Eocene,
With its lush and tropic shores,
Yet laid down some ten million
After the end of the dinosaurs.

I guess the path on which it sat
Was older than all that.
I guess its gravel had to travel
From who knows where, of course –
He’s an immigrant, like the millions
Coming here since the dinosaurs.

Though I suspect it’s less of an ammonite and more of a snail.

Mine For Life

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Mine For Life

A running bump along my arm
Is memory that I was scarred –
The grave to mark a childhood tear
That now you’d scarcely know was there.
I got it playing down the farm,
Or maybe tripping in the yard –
I must have hit the surface hard,
But in the end did no real harm.
A trophy I must always wear,
A lesson learned, a minor scare –
I smile to think how I am marred,
And like to stroke it sometimes, like a charm.

It sits beside my first tattoo,
That’s self-administered, indeed –
A careless stab with ball-point pen,
A funny-coloured freckle, then.
It used to be a deeper blue,
As if I’m of a noble breed –
It must have hurt, but didn’t bleed,
And now just sits there, still in view.
I could not even tell you when,
But certainly by age of ten.
It can’t be scrubbed, it can’t be freed –
I like to poke it sometimes, as y’do.

Hairshirts

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Vertumnus by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Hairshirts

Hey, have you seen this ?  Chillis give us allergies !,
I watched it on The One Show and I read it in The Mail.
Never mind the experts – they claim our claims are fallacies,
Yet we know how we feel – and we’re feeling rather frail.

Hey, have you caught this ?  Cucumbers cause impotence !,
I found it on the internet – it’s all there if you dig.
So much for ‘mostly water’ !  That’s Big Salad’s influence,
They pump them full of chemicals – that’s how they grow so big !

Hey, have you scoped this ?  Sweetcorn gives us cancer !
I heard it at a coffee-shop, and in a waiting room.
So sure, go ahead, if you want to be a chancer,
But know I told you so when those yellow lumps bring doom.

Hey, have you shared this, at Waitrose or Pilates?
Let’s spread the word and spread the fad, and let our bodies heal.
Let’s get some trendy diets at the nation’s dinner parties,
Then maybe I won’t have to taste those bastards ev’ry meal !

“I want to say one word to you, Benjamin, just one word…”

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Photo by Krizjohn Rosales on Pexels.com

“I want to say one word to you, Benjamin, just one word…”

Contact lenses, spectacles, disposable razors,
Medical heart-valves and pencil erasers,
Sterile packaging, gloss paints and superglues,
Motorcycle helmets, fibreglass canoes,
Polytunnel farming, gas- and gutter-piping,
Multicoloured buttons, and click-a-clacker typing,
Hygienic nappies, and vegan-friendly footwear,
And yes, all the litter that ev’rybody put there.

The truth is that we need it,
That we cannot live without it –
Except of course we did
Before we ever knew about it.
But look at all the progress that we’ve made –
Can we lose it all ?  I doubt it.

Self-healing polymers, handle-safe explosives,
Tin-can inner-linings, and packaging for corrosives,
Lego bricks and credit cards, LPs that we cherish,
Electrical cables that will never fray or perish,
Damp-proof damp-courses, and cavity-foam walls,
Artificial limbs and teeth, table-tennis balls,
Satellite shielding, acoustic guitar strings,
Hyper-fibre optics, and a thousand other things.

The truth is that we need it,
That our lives are better for it –
We need to use it less,
But we surely can’t ignore it –
The future’s soft and flexible – be careful,
And we’ll all get to explore it.

Salisbury Cathedral Vaccination Centre

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Christ Cleansing the Temple by Bernardino Mei

Salisbury Cathedral Vaccination Centre

Angels in the ceiling, salvation in the needles,
Organ practice in the air, the bishop looking proud –
Gone is the busyness of canons, deans, and beadles,
But the locked-up church can once again give welcome to the crowd.
Monks used to pray here, monks who ministered the sick –
But these days it is nurses who are rolling up the sleeves.
So what would Jesus say at their death-defying trick ?,
Their communion, regardless what each congregant believes.
Would he drive them out, back to their lab’ratories ?
Or would he get stuck-in with his newfound clientelle ?
Stained-glass in the windows, telling ancient stories –
Maybe in a thousand years, they’ll tell this one as well.

Strictly speaking, there were no monks at Salisbury, but rather secular canons.  These performed the same duties, but weren’t under a monastic rule, and lived in the town rather than in adjacent cells.  Sort of like day-pupils rather than boarders.

Margarita Time

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detail from Banquet of Cleopatra by Geovanni Tiepolo

Margarita Time

Cleopatra dropped a pearl in vinegar
To win a bet,
And watched her bead dissolve away to nothing
Without one regret –
Although in truth it must have fizzed a day or two
Before it’s done
And in that time she’d lost her land and lost her life
And lost her son.
And Rome, while once her lover, saw her lustre tarnish
Bit by bit –
For strip away her cultured beauty,
And she’s just a speck of grit.

Toxic

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Toxic

Poison and venom – the diff’rence between them
Is pedantry.
Biologists may take exception,
But only they should.
Most of the rest of us navigate life
Quite pleasantly
With a definition that’s still close-enough
To be good.

The Blacktop Jungle

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Mulefa from The Amber Spyglass by JamesMargarum

The Blacktop Jungle

Evolution has no use for wheels –
It walks, it never rolls –
Beyond a tumbleweed or spider
That the random wind controls.
For real life lacks our perfect strips
Of smooth and tarmacked roads,
These alien technologies,
These edges linking nodes.
Biology’s against it anyway,
Unless the wheels are dead –
For how can blood and nerves attach
To grow the spokes, repair the tread ?

Though germs can grow their flagellates
Upon an axle, loosely bound –
And they can drive by swimming,
Just by spinning tendrils round and round.
So give a million years or ten,
And life may well adapt
To these ribbons of oil and gravel,
If they haven’t been buried or snapped.
But while terrain is bumpy
And a bogged-down caster cannot trot,
Then legs will always run the show –
The world may turn, but life does not.