Sometimes I compose a science sonnet. In my opinion the form is not limited to love poems or landscape descriptions. I like the rules of containment that sonnets carry: how the limits make me drill into the subject and enter its essence.

I started “Symbiosis” in 2004, shortly after exposure to the subject of mitochondrial DNA and the suggestion that it isn’t inherently “human.”

I polished it in 2008 and saw it published online, in a literary e-pub called cyclamens and swords (still alive and a nice place to visit).

From mitochondria, inside of us,
the scientists can postulate our mom.
It’s Eve in Africa they talk of, plus
they mined analysis and found a bomb:
The mitochondria within each cell?
They’re really other creatures than are we.
We co-exist and co-evolve; we tell
each other back and forth redundantly
the way to live.

I lodge that symbiote,
and wonder what the number may comprise
including dreamers,
or the spark that wrote this poem,
or solving only using eyes.
I lately seem a colony at large,
and though I can’t control, I’m yet in charge.