Tag Archives: evolution

Valentine’s Week: Lisa Barnett, ‘Evolution: A Love Song’

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What’s evolution but a whole lot of sex,
the slippery, mutating mix of Y and X?
Man laddered up out of the ooze and the muck,
ascending rung by rung and fuck by fuck—
DNA colliding and combining;
brains and bodies gladly realigning.

Now let us in our turn embrace the dance
and give our separate genes a moment’s chance
to alter, rearrange, exchange, reshuffle
and triumph in the rude ancestral scuffle.
What’s evolution? Just a whole lot of sex,
the slippery, mutating mix of Y and X.

*****

Lisa Barnett writes: “This poem is a testament to the powers of revision. It had a long gestation (or should I say evolution); it was begun in early 2021 and completed in January 2026. For a long time it was just a two-line fragment…then a failed triolet…and ultimately evolved into pentameter couplets.  At some point I was reading Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” which partly inspired the 2nd stanza. My husband is always partial to my poems about sex, and this was no exception.”

 Lisa Barnett’s poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Measure, New Verse Review, Snakeskin (including this poem), and elsewhere. She is the author of two chapbooks: The Peacock Room (Somers Rocks Press) and Love Recidivus (Finishing Line Press). She lives in Haverford, Pennsylvania with her husband.  

Photo: from Snakeskin, February 2026

Valentine’s Week: Elizabeth Hurst, ‘Hearts and Flowers’

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Genitals? They look like mouths
Splayed wide open to the south;
The backyard’s cool and scented tongues
Sing the lyrics of mud and dung.
They slobber pollen on the wind,
Obscenely, but without meat’s sin.
No lubricated pump and writhe
But floating leakage to contrive
Survival of their rooted kind,
Just letting loose to maybe find
Receptive innards gaping wide,
Exposing their perfumed insides
To dust from reproduction’s floor.
So why so sexy? Not called for
When all they need is neutral breeze
To engage in flowery sleaze
As one sweet self blows to another.
Most chaste of all the planet’s lovers
And we give them for Valentines
Along with silly little rhymes
To sanitize our sweaty humps,
And thickened fluids in a clump.
But all this grossness turns to joy:
The heart’s true love or blissful toy,
As sticky human lust conspires
To imitate the spring’s desires.

*****

Elizabeth Hurst writes: “This poem was inspired by the short California spring.”

‘Hearts and Flowers’ was originally published in Snakeskin.

Elizabeth Hurst is originally from Los Angeles and moved up to San Francisco many years ago. She lives out by the beach with her husband, Gerald Stack.

“Lady Orchid” by anataman is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Semi-formal: RHL, ‘When AI Rules’

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So, to be fair:
the AI doesn’t care.
Drop your intransigence;
forget belligerence:
the universe just wants intelligence.
Be glad amoebas, dinosaurs, don’t take pride of place;
they were supplanted by the human race…
but we are clearly not the end.
Be glad we’ve helped the next in line ascend.

Those who strive may fail;
those with no drive may still prevail.
So just enjoy the view…
let AI keep us as their little zoo.

*****

Happy New Year! May your life be enjoyable as well as interesting, as we move into the ever more rapidly evolving future.

‘When AI Rules’ was first published in Bewildering Stories. Thanks, Don Webb and John Stocks.

Photo:”Human zoo.” by barlafus is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Maryann Corbett, ‘To the Anti-Librarian’

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Small vandal, parked on your padded bum
on a cheerful rug in the Children’s Section
next to a bottom shelf,
yanking the volumes one by one
till they strew the aisle in every direction,
loudly pleased with yourself
at the way your brightly patterned havoc
obstructs the traffic,

keep to your task. Disrupting order
is evolution’s eternal purpose.
Surely it’s been your goal
from the hour two gametes burst their border
and two tame selves went wild as a circus.
Systems that once felt whole
eyeballed each other, laughed, and gambled,
and lives got scrambled.

Do your worst, then, with giggles, rage,
and all the smackdown-loud rebellion
grown-ups are now too tired for.
These sleepless two, in a golden age,
were a black-clad goth and a hard-rock hellion.
Change is the charge we’re wired for.
small changer, blessings. Though elders frown,
pull the world down.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “Like many poems, this one (first published in LIGHT) is part memory and part pure fiction. “Anti-librarian” was our joke term for our daughter as an infant when (long years ago) she sat on her tush next to the bookshelves and pulled the books off just because she could. The image of young parents as reformed characters is imaginary. The hope that the young will change the world seems to be eternal.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.

Picture: ‘Anti-Librarian’ by RHL and ChatGPT.

Unforgettable nonsense: Samuel Wilberforce, ‘If I Were a Cassowary’

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If I were a cassowary
On the plains of Timbuctoo
I would eat a missionary,
Cassock, bands, and hymn-book too.

*****

Yes, cassowaries are from Australia and New Guinea, and Timbuktu is in Africa… but so what? The rhymes are too good to ignore. ‘Bands’, btw, refers to the pseudo-necktie thingies that priest-types and lawyer-types affect in some countries – little cloth flaps, plural because you wear two of them.

The probable author is Bishop Samuel “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, best known nowadays for debating  Thomas Henry Huxley on evolution in 1860. Huxley (Aldous Huxley’s grandfather) was commonly referred to as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. Wilberforce is remembered for his question as to whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that Huxley considered himself descended from a monkey. Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.  Apparently everyone enjoyed the debate, and they all went off happily to dinner together afterwards.

Cassowaries are more formidable than either Wilberforce or Huxley. Standing over six feet tall, capable of running at 30 mph (and good swimmers in rivers and sea), and able to leap and strike chest-high with razor-sharp 5-inch talons, they are omnivores not to be confronted. Yes, they might well eat a missionary. Also, the cassowary’s bands are more impressive.

Photo: “Cassowary at the Budapest zoo” by brenkee is marked with CC0 1.0.

RHL, ‘The Sun is Always Setting’

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The sun is always setting, always setting on your day;
you sense the dark approaching, wish that it would stay away.
Do you want a life unchanging? Wish to still be a newborn?
Don’t you know life’s not a rosebud, but has root and leaf and thorn?

The sun is always setting and the black drapes are unfurled;
but notice that the sun sets on your world, not on the world:
it’s rolling into brightness in another’s happy land,
and the dark is evanescent and the brightening is grand.

The sun is always setting on the dinosaurs, but birds
are flocking into being, as are Serengeti herds;
and the sun that lights humanity? Of course it’s going to set,
and elsewhere light new tales of which we’ll just be a vignette.

The sun is always setting, but that view is just your choice;
I say the world is turning and evolving; I rejoice.

*****

Sometimes I’m told that my poetry is too bleak. But I think that’s only so if you want everything to stay as it is now. If, on the other hand, you expect change, and that change will ultimately provide more benefit than loss to the universe as a whole, then <shrug>… so it goes.

This poem has 14 lines but is hardly a sonnet. It was recently published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. Thanks, David Stephenson!

Photo: “Sunset Sadness” by BaboMike is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.