NaPoWriMo 3/30

The prompt for today, the third day of NaPoWriMo, is to write a poem in celebration of the wedding, which turns out has its own special word, of course, that even my scientifically oriented mouth had difficulty pronouncing. For this reason alone, and not because I dislike marriage, I am going on my own today and will instead be writing about the first topic or headline I stumble upon, which incidentally turns out to be Darwin's Legacy. In reality this is the title of a series of free lectures from Stanford available on youtube, click on the above link if you are interested checking it out. 

A recently discovered symbiotic relationship and a wonderful example of coevolution; green algae cells provide oxygen to developing salamander embryo. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-04/algae-live-inside-developing-salamanders-cells-scientists-find

  
And now without further procrastination, I present...a poem:

Darwin's Legacy

Thirteen species of finches 
Fly around in my head
Their beaks, 
Their beaks torment me 
In my sleep they are pecking and pinching
Pulling and plucking seeds of various sizes
From my cracks and crevices, 
My eyes and fingers burn with their guano
And would you believe I have been living for the last year 
Off  of  seaweed, pre-digested in the gut of a pink iguana?


Oh, the tangled bank is thick
So rife with hierarchical complexity 
And Darwin sailed on the Beagle straight through it
Plowing onwards through the origin of species
A single common ancestor, gone explode
Broken apart like Pangea over evolutionary time
The scatterings of diversity
Arising.