Recall from Time's abysmal chasm
That piece of primal protoplasm
The First Amoeba, strangely splendid,
From whom we're all of us descended.
That First Amoeba, weirdly clever,
Exists today and shall forever,
Because he reproduced by fission;
He split himself, and each division
And subdivision deemed it fitting
To keep on splitting, splitting, splitting;
So, whatsoe'er their billions be,
All, all amoebas still are he.
Zoologists discern his features
In every sort of breathing creatures,
Since all of every living species,
No matter how their breed increases
Or how their ranks have been recruited,
From him alone were evoluted.
King Solomon, the Queen of Sheba
And Hoover sprang from that amoeba;
Columbus, Shakespeare, Darwin, Shelley
Derived from that same bit of jelly.
So famed is he and well-connected,
His statue ought to be erected,
For you and I and William Beebe
Are undeniably amoebae!
(Guiterman, himself a word-play artist,
might appreciate the efforts of a strange group of
anagrammists haunting the 21st Century Web.
[The rule: Rewrite a poem using precisely the stock
of letters in the original.] The "Ode To The Amoeba"
has been so victimized – or 'honored' –
by Mr. Richard Grantham at:
http://www.anagrammy.com/literary/rg/poems-rg11.html#2
with the anagram, "Ode To A Little Blob Of Sperm".
Read it at your own risk.)
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