In coming to know the Human Genome

‘Before the discovery of the Genome, we did not know there was a document at the heart of every cell three billion letters long of whose content we knew nothing – now, having read parts of that book we are aware of myriad new mysteries.’ Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Fourth Estate, 2000


In coming to know the Human Genome

In coming to know the Human Genome,
we move nearer to understanding God -

not further away, as science has wrongly
driven us to conclude hitherto; far nearer

to hearing, reading, knowing the Word -
understanding the organic/spirit concept.

Science has turned the Victorian corner -
elaborating the white formula, Latin map,

it took for the nature, entire, of skeleton
and bone; red corpuscles, valve, muscle,

pumping blood mechanism, mistaken
for the whole heart solved, understood -

recognising now, under unromantic laboratory
striplights, this cold, synthetic gleam it mistook

for its own neutered soul, narrowness miscalculated
as clarity of vision - meanness of its slice scalpelled

from reality, analysed - alienated from context.
Always knowing somewhere this rigid, absolute

model did not fit these imprecise edges of reality -
where the utterly exact, knowable, comprehensible,

immutable, measureable, bleeds in and out
everywhere; is connected to everything else.