Spontaneous generation

the ancients believed that you only needed to place hay in water to generate life...we're not so different

Macerate a few herbs aromatic

fennel, thyme, cardamom

inside the fifties housewife’s head scarf

before she stows away on the back of

an air force drone

to the old country

where her mother’s

slaughtering a goat with a

broken Coke bottle

and her father’s learning how

to dog proof the Christmas tree

No one’s taken off their boots in months

and when she passes them the shoe horn

it’s all over as soon as the landlord says

“Please, no ethnic cooking”

and you foolishly reply

“It’s just hard boiled eggs”

Reviews

[Julie McCarthy (juliesp..]

Very interesting very deep thought provoking
I may need to read again n again
To get it
Don’t mind me that wasn’t an insult on my part on the contrary it was a bravo

[Matthew Kult]

Lovely visuals, creatively out poured.

Fantastic read

With love,

Matthew

[KWP]

An incredibly creative response to the anger you thought (which I red in comments below). I too get angry how white man comes with their own way of life and their own set of rules and believes it is the best way. Being an Aussie, I have always been interested in Aboriginal beliefs, I mean, Aussie Aboriginals are the oldest race in the world, they must have been doing something right for 40,000 years.

We all have our own unique interpretations of life. When I worry for future generations about the state of our planet, my son reassures me that we humans can solve problems, it is what we do. This is the kind of thinking the younger generation must move forward with.

Your poem though, intriguing, visual a great concoction.

[Eilis]

My daughter jokes about spontaneous generation a lot. She loves the idea that people believed this. I watched a whole program on the concept and how men, in a time before micro life was known, believed life could be created with recipes. It explains alchemy, which in some ways we’ve created a modern version of that ‘science’, but when you look back on what people believed sometimes it just seems absurd. Perhaps it is a bigger leap for our imaginations sometimes to put ourselves ‘back’ and understand the minds of people we did not/do not know. All things we don’t understand tend to become somewhat mythical to us. We have no defense but to make assumptions in an effort to create a narrative for ourselves to make things make sense. Often enough these created narratives are destructive and allow the most horrendous things. Your mention of drones leads my mind, in some ways. Seeing this poem was published in 2012 I have to go back in time a little and remember current events at that time. But even without that journey, the juxtaposition of the drone to the ‘old-country’ does lead me in some ways. I remember at the outset of the Iraq war there were people in the US who would thoughtlessly say the entire country or region should be bombed and destroyed. This is where our lack of understanding becomes dangerous. Living beings aren’t birthed and existing only in our imaginations but have real, deep histories (evolutions) and cultures that we may never have the capacity to understand. Again, I see the dangers (maybe not the best word) of unbridled curiosity here. When we believe we ourselves hold the power to create and destroy without accountability, things can get ugly pretty fast. The images you use are so evocative. And also offer this sort of visceral emotional pull—but then there’s that undertone of humor that tempers it all. Great work.

[SkinlessFrank]

Thanks once again for your deep insight. When I wrote this piece I was angry, angry at the destruction rained down on people who were outside the ability of some to understand as living beings with an ancient culture that could be ignored and so treated as outside human life as we understand it. I used to joke about spontaneous generation too, when my son would leave is old socks and sports clothes in a pile inside his closet.

[Terpsichore]

"Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,' And all that. :)

T

[CLR9]

I think aliens take poops. Is it hard to believe?

[Beccy]

Strip away the multi layered veneers of our ever advancing 'civilisation,' and we are indeed not so different.

Beccy.

[emmajoy]

An incredibly honest or maybe raw piece of writing.. a looking back in forward thinking language. People, wherever they are, whatever they seek, and however they do are what birth decreed them. There's such a fine roundabout union between using a drone yet carrying herbal ingredients as if altering self via technology and magical spells. Or that's how i see it.. right or wrong!

[kmartell]

Reading this is so enjoyable. How the crooked line both enlightens and deceives.

[Cameron Berry]

I thoroughly enjoyed this work. It was truly dramatic, and gets at the inability of stealing culture, just foolishly revising it. Nice work.