A merchant of fear when they're seen
Those seeds planted early
Yet they precede, the dominant who owns prominence
Endeavors of knowledge in order to understand
Maybe to replicate their genetic strand
So we can up our standing in life.
Complex yet simple,
Longevity unmatched,
The extent of their survival ability untapped
Interesting creatures with features we'd love to have
Yet when seen our first instinct is to smash
The dichotomy of fear and admiration
The focus point of this conversation
A man once said mankind fears what they don't know
So, would that fear subside if we understood what made them go
What makes them tick, the intricacies of their behavior
Could it change our own,
So that then we would be able to accept them
Instead of hurling stones
I wonder
I think your point about how mankind fears what it does not know is very astute. Still, cockroaches are gross. This book has not changed my opinion in that regard.
ReplyDeleteI have just recently watched "The Amazing Spiderman." If you have seen it, you know there is a lot of cross-speices DNA engineering that takes place in the movie. That is the first thing I thought about when reading your poem. In the movie Dr. Connors was of course fascinated by combining human with lizard DNA because he had lost an arm, and saw that as a way to grow it back. But if some fictional scientists were to want to find the most resilient species' DNA to splice, as you stated in the poem, it very well may be the cockroach.
ReplyDeleteReally like this! especially that you added that we fear what we do not understand and that we have no understanding of their survivability (the joke that the only things that will really survive an atomic attack would be roaches and twinkies.)
ReplyDelete