My Amoeba Is Unaware

Scott, Francis Reginald (1899 - 1985)

Original Text

F.R. Scott, F.R. Scott: Selected Poems (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966): 120-21.

1of this poem in its favour, though it shares

2in my totality. Like adverbs, it qualifies

3that to which it is attached, adding

4slowly, carefully, painfully, to my living.

5Hosts pay for dinner though the guest

6be uninvited, and symbiosis

7is seldom equal. What most impresses me

8is its immortality, and the ‘bigness of its littleness’.

9Truly a marvel of adaptation, equally at home in ponds or paunches

10since the beginning of life, and a threat to religion, with

11an ancestry older than all the gods. Not being oviparous,

12and multiplying geometrically by diffusion of fission,

13parent and child are the same. Such a conception

14is wholly immaculate, needing no redemption.

15Hence no one is born at the expense of another

16and death is purely external, an accident

17but not a law. Then as its size

18is the reverse of colossal, it seems as far removed

19as a prowling space-ship, thus creating

20a vastness and mythology in my internal universe

21which makes me macroscopic. Too long

22have the surfaces sufficed us. Beauty, we are mistaught,

23is skin deep, and holy men, lonely in caves,

24have tried to resist temptation

25by dwelling on the viscera of women,

26thus spitting at heaven and bespattering themselves.

27I proclaim equal rights for the parts, the wonder

28of interdependence, the worth

29of the cellular proletariate whose ceaseless labour

30builds the cathedral of eyes and hands. I honour

31the encyclopaedia of the pseudopodia. The I of the self

32is no less in them than in the entire colony, for individuality

33lies beneath collectivity. But as to a relationship

34unsought by either side, there is need

35for bio-justice. None need tolerate

36invasion of frontiers, bascillary insurrections,

37unicellular anarchy, though such zeal

38be without evil. I am its good, it is not mine, and herein lies

39the right of defence. Therefore though I praise

40this protozoic ancestor,

41I aim at its death with all my feeble weapons,

42knowing I do not know if it still survive.

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire / Sharine Leung

RPO Edition

2011

Rhyme

unrhyming

Form

varying