Inheritance

In spring, mauve lilacs; eight weeks later
purple buddleia, attracts butterflies
to the wasteland - the old quarry pit that
has become an impromptu rubbish dump.

A modern midden - by direct line of descent
from those archaeological middens of iron
age settlements. That time should be at
points connected in this strange manner
might cause surprise, but some human habits

find it hard to die and run on through time
as continuous as stars are stretched out
along the Milky Way, or Wordsworth's daffodils
that stretched in endless line along the margin
of the bay his Lakeland waters did enfold.

Such kinds of continuity exist in many actions,
habits, forms of behaviour so engrained, as to be
governed by our genes - built-in but hidden,
until some chance mutation enters upon the scene.
We can neither predict, nor know what has been,

will be. Not know what throw back, we may in
the future come to know. Things begun, before
their time had come . . . was right; those occasions
when we could not do otherwise but yield to those
forming forces, hidden, persisting, working,

deep within life's instructing stream
the genome's lasting dream of
all possible possibilities.

Rick Storey