The Moon’s Word

‘Th’unwearied Sun from day to day/ Does his Creator’s pow’r display;/ And publishes, to every land,/ The work of an almighty hand.// Soon as the evening shades prevail,/ The Moon takes up the wond’rous tale;/ And nightly to the listening Earth,/ Repeats the story of her birth…’ Joseph Addison, 1672-1719, An Ode

The Moon’s Word

It is the Moon’s word - hung
silver among whispering stars.

Shining white root,
before dust, stone -

the chattering letters of life -
organic noise of water, blood,

flesh and green;
elegies of death.

Wearing her soul -
which is cold light,

as insect and ice
wear exoskeleton;

her own lonely species
of light - honed so cool,

austerely holy, pure; turned
madly bright with loneliness.


A ragged rock bowl
of numb winter sea

hears her silver word,
even in sleeping skin,

mirror ear-sheen;
real as a dream -

twitches, remembering
vibrant sun languages;

the dazzling blindness,
shattering into wet fire -

poaching corpulent autumn suns,
sinking under, orange, overripe -

gutted gold light punctured
slowly over syrupy waves,

turning warm red
as animal blood.


In Nights’s black printing ink,
Moon’s white word is written;

voicing her negative, faux light,
until even a high, queenly tree -

wearing her jewel in keener’s hair -
her sparkling winter starnet tangles,

kneels to her waist in black soil;
and blue Earth holds her breath -

listening, all suspended, resting,
to the fledgling night-angel cry,

born apprentice in Nature’s pantheon;
a startling white owl, silver-dipped -

winged ornament, perfect accessory
in dark schemes of decorating night;

hearing the murdered animal spirits
crawling among moss, fallen leaves;

brittle consonants of glinting black flints -
river’s mercurial skin, her travelling heart

of music; long humming conundrums
of identity - signature impermanence -

smudging milk-blue air with luminosity;
sickly ghosts of her closed honeysuckle –

white brides who have failed with bees;
nunly they hang, offering up sacrifice -

perfume as the last prayer of the flower,
mimicking a signature smell of Heaven.


Her cold white sound,
bloodless command,

has won the season’s night -
overcome both Sun and Earth,

which no longer breathe;
leaving only monuments.


Moon, always the last white light
left on in the sky for child Earth -

last word on Night’s black page;
printing Sun’s lifeless blueprint,

her heartless pressed flower,
as our body makes bearable

God’s light - so transfigured,
we can look upon ourselves.


It is the Moon’s word
hung in black silence.

The word Grace

The word Grace

In the loveless company of stars,
reading of the Human Genome,
twinkling map of organic existence -

of kinship with the dark leaf
crying silver in my brother palm,
owl hooting his nocturnal love -

stuttering mouse, nervous at nut supper,
rheumatic tree cracking bulging knuckles,
skewering the fat yellow buttermoon -

honeysuckle sugar polluting
the blue ghost of evening;
moths bumping plumply into light -

thinking of the Word
calling all life
from chemicals and love -

everything alive,
from the same trinity of letters,
this simple holy script,

I hunted my language archive -
like a smoker, restless at midnight,
turning out sofas, dusty drawers,

old unworn clothes, dead and stiff;
desperate for just the right thing -
rifling the Contemporary Section,

Popular Idiom, Vernacular;
neat boxes of Metaphor -
shimmering, spilling shelves of Simile -

onward to the Science Department’s
rusty hinges, ignoring the need for ID,
warning signs for trespassers, ignoramuses,

to Chemistry’s mysterious incandscent symbols,
Biology’s volatile Latin -
through History’s shifting, creaking doors -

at last, wandering through Elegy,
the shining halls of Poetry -
built of silver bones and fundamental music -

sparkling dictionaries of Wonder,
luminescent Myth and Legend -
whispering polished figures like gold statues,

until a gas-lit room, mellow, wood-panelled,
smelling of bees and apples -
there a clutch of Old Fashioned Words

like threatened birds’ eggs
in a mahogany, Victorian windowed box;
and there it was, suddenly -

so shining still, no wonder it is holy;
under time-embroidered cobwebs,
silver yet, though dimmed with age -

‘GRACE’.

I cupped the word in both palms,
holding its calm golden light
like a dying September leaf -

dusted it down, tenderly,
polishing the word with my lips,
slotting it home in my heart

like a compatible disk –
shivering, whirring upload
as it was read - exactly, perfectly;

spreading through me like centuries
of matured autumn light, dimly
speckled with sparkling dust-stars,

low humming sounds of bee spirituals -
weary honey workers returning home,
worn, through a rusty gold evening.

Darwing

‘...Coy Nature….Took sanctuary like Daphne in a tree./ There Daphnes lover stop’t, and thought it much/ The very Leaves of her to touch,/ But Harvey our Apollo, stopt not so,/ Into the Bark, and root he after her did goe:/ No smallest Fibres of a Plant,/ For which the eiebeams Point doth sharpness want,/ His passage after her withstood./ What should she do? through all the moving wood/ Of Lives indow’d with sense she took her flight,/ Harvey persues, and keeps her still in sight./ But as the Deer long-hunted takes a flood,/ She leap’t at last into the winding streams of blood;/ Of mans Meander all the Purple reaches made,/ Till at the heart she stay’d/…Here sure shall I be safe (said she)/ None will be able sure to see/ This my retreat, but only He/ Who made both it and me./ The heart of Man, what Art can e’re reveal?/…but e’re she was aware,/ Harvey was with her there,/ And held this slipperyProteus in a chain,/ Till all her mighty Mysteries she descry’d,/ Which from his wit the attempt before to hide/ Was the first Thing that Nature did in vain.// He the young Practise of New Life did see,/…Before the untaught Heart began to beat/ The tuneful March to vital Heat,/ From all the Souls that living Buildings rear,/ Whether imply’d for Earth, or Sea, or Air,/ Whether it in the Womb or Egg be wrought,/ A strict account to him is hourly brought,/ How the Great Fabrick does proceed,/ What time and what materials it does need/…Thus Harvey sought for Truth in Truth’s own Book/ The Creatures, which by God himself was writ;/ And wisely thought ‘twas fit,/ Not to read Comments only upon it,/ But on th’original it self to look./ Methinks in Arts great circle others stand/ Lock’t up together, Hand in Hand,/ Every one leads as he is led,/ The same bare path they tread,/ A Dance like Fairies a Fantastick round,/ But neither change their motion, nor their ground…’ Abraham Cowley, 1618-67, Ode upon Dr Harvey

‘…I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect’; of this history we possess the last volume alone…Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly changing language, in which history is supposed to be written, being more of less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of life entombed in our consecutive, but widely separated formations.’ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859

‘We are confirming Darwin - it's great to be getting the molecular correlates of what Darwin hypothesised 150 years ago.’ Sir John Sulston, Leader, UK Human Genome Project

Darwing

Darwin of course became an angel
called, fittingly, Darwing - shining

because he wept in the very darkness
he thought he had made - thinking

he had put out this ancient holy light,
proved God Himself out of existence -

invisible in his own scheme;
but searching for God still

like an eye in the darkness
that would not re-open -

knowing he was right -
feeling the unity of life,

but creating physical visions
where the old God of the day,

men had moulded, cast,
could not, would not, fit.

But feeling Him prickle still in the dark,
agnostic before the word was invented -

sensing betrayal and unease of so many,
not least his own wife, for God’s sake -

so, on revelation of the Human Genome,
of course there was a party up in Heaven

at the unexpected marriage
of science and religion -

all these unhappy holy scientists,
James Clerk Maxwell, Einstein -

many others, drunk on vintage nectar,
stuffing grinning faces with ambrosia.

And Darwing swooping, whooping overhead,
dazzling white like an enormous crazy swan.

Nature, sprung improbably

‘In this one of all fields I know the best/ All day and night, hoarse and melodious, sounded/ a creeping corncrake, coloured like the ground,/ till the cats got him and gave the rough air rest….// -Summer now is diminished, is less by him./ Something that it could say cannot be spoken – As though the language of a subtle folk/ Had lost a word that had no synonym.’ Norman MacCaig, A Voice of Summer

‘To make the natural world safe for physics, Decartes pushed consciousness right out of it into a separate spiritual world, treating each soul or mind as a spiritual substance, made of a stuff alien to other earthly items... But it seems increasingly clear that one extreme view is not more workable than the other. Materialism and idealism are equally the products of dualism.’ Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, Routeledge, 2003

Nature, sprung improbably

Nature, sprung improbably
from mystery of the Word,

stardust molecules - light
and water, will burst into

green stars on trees,
human hands, bats;

butterflies, flowers,
wings, flying fish.

But her deeper magic -
written at the beginning,

is maintained, still irreducible;
principle of stark complexity –

RNA the big magic, original
rabbit from a Universal hat -

bridging the holy code
with art and chemistry,

understanding of production;
conducting free range matter,

as only our own mysterious
unproved soul understands -

wiring of Heaven and Earth -
metaphor, story, truth, as one.

Without the Word - nothing

‘…several classes of facts…seem to me to proclaim so plainly, that the innumerable species, genera, and families of organic beings, with which this world is peopled, have all descended, each with its own class or group, from common parents.’ Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859

‘Why we are not like ET - Samples of DNA taken from humans, animals, plants, microbes and viruses have one thing in common: they form a double helix structure held together by four different chemicals called bases. And scientists from New Zealand and Sweden have now built a computer model to show that organisms are unlikely to evolve if their "life code" is written using more or fewer bases. The work could help our understanding of what to expect from alien lifeforms - if we ever come across them. Reading along the double helix, the sequence of the bases can be read off as a genetic code made of four letters - A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine and T for thymine. This code carries the instructions for creating and maintaining life, but why not use two letters, or six or eight? ET in the famous Spielberg film was said to have six-base DNA and, on the face of it, Earth-bound life could have, too. The reason why not turns out to be in the way a prehistoric relative of DNA began to protect itself against copying errors. Paul Gardner, and colleagues…used a computer model to try to explain why four turned out to be the magic number. It is not entirely clear how life first began on Earth, but many biologists believe that before our current DNA-dominated world, there was an environment known as RNA World. RNA is a similar chemical to DNA but it is much less stable and so much less suitable for holding the blueprint information for building complex organisms. Supporters of the RNA World theory believe that RNA evolved from simpler chemicals and only later evolved into DNA. RNA would have existed in a constantly changing and reactive soup. Gardner and his colleagues built a computer model…to examine how RNA might have developed had it had two, six or eight bases, as well as the standard four. They found that four- and six-base RNA molecules were the most efficient at evolving into DNA. But four-base RNAs were the ones which were best suited to overcoming RNA's fundamental weakness: its susceptibility to making errors as it copies itself. The two- and eight-base RNAs seem to get stuck somewhere along the evolution process... But six-base RNAs could have survived if they had evolved a way of putting right the errors introduced by mutation. The research poses the question of what kind of DNA extra-terrestrial life might have if a similar process of evolution had taken place on a similar planet elsewhere in the Universe. "We found the margins between four- and six-letter alphabets to be low, so a percentage of independent lifeforms might incorporate six, or a different four. "But it is likely that the same principles that life on Earth are based on will be used elsewhere," Gardner said. If RNA-based lifeforms on other planets had developed the error-correcting techniques needed to repair the damage to their genetic code caused by mutation and degeneration, they may well have developed into something with six-base DNA. "I'd love to meet an organism with a six-letter alphabet. However, they'd probably take a lot longer to sequence," he said.’ Ivan Noble, BBC News Online, 2003

Without the Word - nothing

Without the Word, nothing
coming among uncultured

stars, under a dusty white Moon -
just stone bones adorning night’s

black charnel-house, silver
graves of collapsing matter.

In the whole Galaxy - Earth
heard, turning blue as an eye,

in the blink of aeons, marshalling
her creatures, her flowers, leaves,

from dreaming amoebae in the heart
of water; hearing the possible poems,

composing them in earth and light
metamorphosed into cells; skeleton,

flesh and wing, all her organic poetry -
laboured from the musical molecules.

‘LUCA’ – Last Universal Common Ancestor

‘Curiously, although his theory emphasized male-female distinctions, his description in the Origin always placed the primordial ancestor, or ‘the ancient progenitor’ outside, or previous to, gender or sexed system; an ‘it’, never a ‘he’ or ‘she’. Gillian Beer, Introduction to the Origin of Species 1859, Oxford University Press, 1988

‘Back before the dinosaurs, before the first fishes, before the first worms, before the first plants, before the first fungi, before the first bacteria, there was an RNA world - probably somewhere around four billion years ago, soon after the beginning of planet earth’s very existence and when the universe itsef was only 10 billion years old. We do not know what these ribo-organisms looked like. We can only guess at what they did for a living, chemically speaking. We do not what came before them. We can be pretty sure they once existed because of clues to RNA’s role that survive in living organisms today. These ribo-organisms had a big problem. RNA is an unstable susbstance which falls apart within hours. Had these organisms ventured anywhere hot or tried to grow too large they would have faced what geneticists call an error catastrophe – a rapid decay of the message in their genes. One of them invented by trial and error a new and tougher version of RNA called DNA and a system for making RNA copies from it, including a machine we’ll call the proto-ribosome. It had to work fast and it had to be accurate. So it stiched together genetic copies three letters at a time, the better to be fast and accurate. Each threesome came flagged with a tag to make it easier for the proto-ribosome to find, a tag made of amino acid. Much later, those tags themselves became joined togther to make proteins and the three letter word became a form of code for the proteins – the genetic code itself. (Hence, to this day the code consists of three letter words each spelling out a particular one of twenty amino acids as part of a recipe for a protein.) And so was born a more sophisticated creature that stores its genetic recipe in its DNA, made its working machines of protein and used RNA to bridge the gap between them. Her name was LUCA – the Last Universal Common Ancestor.’ Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Fourth Estate, 2000

‘Last year has also witnessed the unveiling of the first molecular map of the ribosome, the cell's protein factory. This has given us startling new details about its structure and may boost support for RNA (ribonucleic acid) being the first "living" molecule on Earth.’ BBC Online


‘LUCA’ – Last Universal Common Ancestor

Even before DNA - RNA -
unstable, sucking more life

from the inchoate chemical world -
defining in the blurred creative soup

of transient genes, urging
to be, replicate - just stay.

Becoming ‘organic copier’;
stitcher, cutter and paster -

translator, builder, joiner,
fixer, connector - bridge.

Keeping itself patterned in DNA,
drawing order into possible life -

hearing the Word four billion years ago
in swimming silence, dim interpretation

of the frustrating invisibility of God -
call for creativity as a first principle;

making its own skeleton for us all,
boneless - yet imagined or dreamt.


Ur-gene, first gene; prettily named LUCA,
the ‘Last Universal Common Ancestor’ -

author of the code, writer of the three letter
words holding us in existence; maintaining

our fleshy shell, transforming wet molecules
to scaffold bone; metamorphosing chemistry

that wrote gold barley’s whiskered ear -
heaven-colour of blurred hummingbird,

shining armour of the patent beetle –
owl eye, eagle wing; old melancholy

hunchback sunflower studying earth.
The bridge translating coded stores -

DNA copied into RNA; reading the words,
translating into protein - building limb, fin,

finger, leaf; still reading ourselves,
making ourselves from glued code -

billion upon billion years rehearsing,
but never tiring, becoming dispirited;

like LUCA herself,
who wanted to be -

as earless leaves cramped
unborn within the branch

hear spring and sun.
As space and stars,

heard the Word,
dreamt of Earth.

LUCA not one, but many;
fountain of species, flood,

still printed in our word
with the worm and fish -

tree, bird -
water, star.

RNA

‘RNA was the Word. RNA left behind five little clues to its priority over both protein and DNA. Even today, the ingredients of DNA are made by modifying the indredients of RNA, not by a more direct route. Also DNA’s letter Ts are made from RNA’s letter Us. Many modern enzymes, though made of protein, rely on small molecules of RNA to make them work. Moreover, RNA, unlike DNA and protein, can copy itself without assistance: give it the right ingredients and it will stitch them together into a message. Wherever you look in the cell, the most primitive and basic functions require the presence of RNA. It is an RNA-dependent enzyme that takes the message, made of RNA, from the gene. It is an RNA-containg machine, the ribosome, that translates that message, and it is a little RNA molecule that fetches and carries the amino acids for the translation of the gene’s message. But above all, RNA - unlike DNA - can act as a catalyst, breaking up and joining other molecules including RNAs themselves. It can cut them up, join the ends together, make some of its own building blocks, and elongate a chain of RNA. It can even operate on itself, cutting out a chunck of text and splicing the free ends together again. The discovery of these remarkable properties of RNA in the early 1980s… transformed our understanding of the origin of life. It now seems probable that the very first gene, the ‘ur-gene’, was a combined replicator-catalyst, a word that consumed the chemicals around it to duplicate itself. It may well have been made of RNA.’ Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Fourth Estate, 2000

‘During the dearth and lack of those two thousand/ million years of death, one wishes primarily/ Just to grasp tightly, to compose, to circle,/ To link and fasten skilfully, as one/ Crusty grey bryozoan builds upon another,/ To be anything particular…To become godlike with transformation.’ Pattian Rogers, The Voice of the Precambrian Sea

‘Henceforth, for the animate, to last was to mean to change,/ existing both for one’s own sake, and that of all others,/ forever in jeopardy.’ WH Auden, 1907-1973, Unpredictable but Providential

‘The DNA makes a simpler molecule called RNA which interacts with ribosomes which churn out proteins based on the code in the genome. Some proteins then interact with a structure called the Golgi complex, which inspects packages and labels proteins before handing them over for distribution elsewhere in the cell.’ BBC, 2003

‘It is the classic case of chicken and egg: which came first, DNA or protein? It cannot have been DNA, because DNA is a helpless passive piece of mathematics, which catalyses no chemical reactions. It cannot have been protein, because protein is pure chemistry with no known way of copying itself accurately. It seems impossible either that DNA invented protein or vice versa. This might have remained a baffling and strange condundrum had not the word left a trace of itself faintly drawn on the filament of life. Just as we know now that eggs came long before chickens (the reptilian ancestors of all birds laid eggs), so there is growing evidence that RNA came before proteins. RNA is a chemical substance that links the two worlds of DNA and protein. It is used mainly in the translation of the message from the alphabet of DNA to the alphabet of proteins. But in the way it behaves, it leaves little doubt that it is the ancestor of both. RNA was Greece to DNA’s Rome: Homer to her Virgil.’ Matt Ridley, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters, Fourth Estate, 2000


RNA

Chemical Word -
spirit of life incarnate

in nascent chemistry -
guddling among Elements;

such light upon the water,
which will knit beams -

muscular feel of current,
into verdant dreams -

into molecular flesh,
swarming real green.


Print of the Word -
enshrined, infinite

while Earth lives.
Still star-sailing

whispering anywhere again -
hot rocks, mountains, water;

something found
out of darkness.


Communication of the Word,
translator of idea into flesh -

organic root; earth-nub;
realisation of the Word.


Active Principle of the Word -
original messenger, Olympian

bearing creativity;
life’s viral fires.


First Art of Chemistry -
first artist of the Word;

understanding desire
to be, to make, create,

for no reason but life,
expression and being.

Breaking - stitching
swarming molecules;

feeling something possible
will come into existence -

cradling one wet cell
dreaming of the flower

when no flower will be
for three billion years.


Why are men afraid to shout
these fabulous Earth miracles,

such shining, unlikely principles -
from mud and light will come us all.


RNA - understanding molecular creativity,
organic artistry, unextinguishable by time -

composer, conductor of chemicals
dreaming in water - such journey

to the white Poles, deserts, mountains,
from her bowl, sea-womb, light-seed -

spectacular travel to wing and eye,
breathing under still water, hooking

possibility from dark atoms of nothing;
connecting with star vibrations - dust.

Learner, teacher, catalysing knowledge;-
the Word driving a fantastic chemistry.