Survival of the fittest in a high stakes play-ball? Of how human hot air was brought to its knees byĪ game! Serve and matchpoint, the winner takes all In Covid-ean times, could there be a more vivid metaphor This is what happens when we try to lasso the moon. That’s 78 by 36 feet for anyone counting,Ī tennis court of lung! Strewn like exploded balloon! The area covered would be a whole tennis court! Trachea, bronchi, alveoli and their pulmonary gauze When you disentangle a single human’s lungs on a board Spongy and grey, like wet cauliflowerĭipped in cement or caught in rain showers Look less like bellows and more like a well-traveled The lungs, she said, when completely unraveled Thomas akka gave us this: a picture beyond text Of all the visuals seared into my aging cortex Its funny how old bio classes leave us with vivid images That hang in our ribcage like two giant beehives Oh the lungs! Oh the lungs! those dense green arbors (and arbiters) of life So target their tool-making laboring handsĪnd then, and then, go straight for the lungs, their central command. They’re the only great apes with fully opposable thumbs The sense they use to show affection, caress, make love They can’t see, hear or smell us so hit them through touch To make it truly pandemic, a global travail Hitchhike on their trade routes by plane, ships and rail Just isolate them and put them in quarantine Remembering lessons from illustrious kin:īalance deadliness with contagion You want to keep those humans alive Leaping from bat to – we think – pangolin Which straightened its crown and went out for a spin Lo and behold, out tumbled the novel SARS-Cov2 Turns out it had its own geneology: SevenĬorona’d ancestors including common cold and the fluīegat and begat, and like a game of tambola Of nature, ozone layers, wildlife and wildforestsĬreated the sets for a new virus to arrive on the scene.ĭid it inherit the wind, did it resemble a demon? That great tipping point where human destruction We get to 2019 in the Age of the Anthropocene But as more and more viruses leaped into our genes Or anatomical relics like coccyx or appendixįorgotten remnants of our own double helix? Truth be told – biologically, they seemed downright idiotic.īut … ( sotto voce) had we read them completely wrong?Ĭould it be that viruses were not in-betweeners at allīut pioneer species, the earth’s proto-critters?
#Third rock from the sun origin of phrase etymology pro#
Neither Archaea nor Bacteria neither pro nor eu-karyotic In Python-speak, they were organisms that weren’t. Inert with a nucleic heart, but no other street cred If anything, they seemed outliers that had slipped through the cracks.īetwixt and between, anomalies that couldn’t be seen We didn’t know enough/about the lowly virus’ makeup. Only proving the point that while the rest of us The missing links archaeopteryx, eohippus Or how life crawled out of the Jurassic seas, Through mitosis, meiosis, Lucy, Watson and Crick In the great Chain of Being, the tall Tree of LifeĪnd even as we learnt about all creatures small and big In Thomas Akka’s sundrenched high-school biology labĪnd while I remember so much about those classesīecause even way back then, if memory serves, they didn’t seem to fit I first heard the word virus – meaning any virus, all viruses Never learning that Athithi Devo Bhava also applied to cellular quests. Or mop up their mess as they made their hosts gravely, seriously ill They overstayed, didn’t clean up their spills Let’s unzip our coats, Let’s start to playĪs we know, the viruses proved terrible guests These warm human bodies make perfect motels Let’s copy ourselves, let’s get more of us made. Liked what they saw and said, let’s replicate Those arrogant bipeds who’d taken over the world, Until over the years, they found the perfect host to tarry a while: So they hitched rides on anything that moved Go forth and multiply, went an adage they knew
The viral ancestors of our contemporary pestsĪnd decided to venture out far from their ’hood The earlier medical sense, superseded by the current scientific use, was ‘a substance produced in the body as the result of disease, especially one capable of infecting others’ late Middle English (denoting the venom of a snake): from Latin, literally ‘slimy liquid, poison’.
Written between May and November 2020 (no, scratch that – started in May, languished for months, and posted just before two critical events, both announced on November 9, that will likely change the course of this virus’ history and itihasa: Biden’s win in the US elections and Pfizer’s announcement of a possible Covid vaccine! Until which … )
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