wonderful life

as alien as anything on Earth
a moray has no fingers or thumbs but
to feed its length (if not so much its girth)
laryngeal jaws drag prey down to its gut
and hagfish get along without a jaw
content to wrench a living from the dead
a slimy sort of motile deep-sea craw
but teeth distinguish one end as the head
a further branch displays cephalopods
whose retinas make ours look crude and blind
edentate image of their limber gods
endowed--if not with joints--with a fine mind
Charles Darwin sketched our wondrous fam'ly tree
my cousins don't look anything like me

Nature and Nurture

dual legacies in proteges and blood
we live in those we've taught and those we've spawned
when tongue and heart are silenced in the mud
to never rise and greet another dawn
a teacher, like a parent never dies
like waves that neve wholly come to rest
constraining future options in their lives
each fledgling goes imprinted from the nest
we're shaped by culture no less than by genes
and each mutates, 'though one goes fast, one slow
'though Dawkins likes us to mere machines
we're not just what we are, but what we know
the time biologists would call a blink
spans generations where we learned to think