NOVELTY

In writing verse like this, the interplay
Between what’s programmed and spontaneous,
Between that something you may mean to say
And what indeed you do’s mysterious,

For something else proceeds from depths unknown,
Not rational but more intuitive,
Not conscious but subliminally grown,
Or, if you will, it’s what the Muses give.

So too it is, I see, throughout the world
Of living things, genetically programmed
To replicate the patterns tightly curled
In genomes wherein information’s crammed,

And yet each birth is an anomaly,
Uniquely new in its identity.

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