A Season's diversion

Odes to the Season (sort of) 

Wikimedia commons images:Chrismas Magic 2008 - panoramio.jpg

The CRISPR's frustration

Pace Joyce Kilmer: Trees

I think that I shall never see

A gene as lovely as a tree.

A gene whose histones’ mouth is pres’d

‘Gainst coiled enhancer’s flowing twist;

A tree that links its genes all day,

For lofting leafy arms to splay;

No gene alone in Summer bears

A nested interaction’s fare;  

Upon whose basis shape is lain;

Who intimately breathes the rain.

Genes are named by fools like me,

But lonely genes can’t make a tree.

How do I leaf thee?

After Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnet 43

How to I leaf thee?  Let me count the ways.

I leaf thee to the depth and breadth and height

My bows can reach, when flow’ring out of sight

For the ends of branching in ideal place.

I leaf thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by shade in clearing’s light.

I leaf thee fully, as my stomates’ right

I leaf thee petally, as I've ta’en from phloem.

I leaf thee with the pollen put to use

In my old grafts, and with my saplings’ fronds.

I leaf thee with a leaf I’m doomed to lose

With my lost seas’ns.  I leaf thee with the branch,

Stems, tips, of all my life; and, if Ground choose,

I shall but mulch thee better after death.

Instructor's lament

After Emily Dickinson: I am Nobody

I'm nobody!  Who are you?

Have you no funding, too?

Then there's a pair of us--don't tell!

They'd banish us--to teach!

How dreary to be somebody!

How pander, like a fraud

To boast your name the livelong day

To the reviewing bawd!

....And finally, here's another adulteration, that we might read, even in a season for joy, a thought for our ecologically destructive age:

Forest, Osaka, Japan.  Source: Wikimedia images

Evangeline 

After HW Longfellow: Evangeline (opening lines)

This is the foresters’ evil,

The sawing of pines and the hemlocks,

Once bearded with moss, and in garments green, that indistinct in the twilight,

Stood like Druids of old; but now with voices sad and prophetic,

Sounding like harpers' howl, weep tears that rest on their bosoms.

Loud from its raucous cuttings, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean

Hears, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

This was the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it

Leaped like the roe, when he heard in the woodland the oncoming humans?

Where is the thatched-wild vista, then home of a Halcyon fauna?

Source: Holly Wreath: Wiki images