Genesis and Embryogenesis

by Patricia Phillips-Batoma 

i
And so it was written that in seven days
God created the sun and the moon,
curled the clematis vine, periwinkled
its flowers blue and plumped coral
the petals of peonies. Light fell
on patterned butterfly wings, glossed
hummingbird bodies, and night moonlit
the feathered antennae of the moth.
Lizards basked in radiating desert sands
and beneath the waves,
cephalopods
swerved in and out of shadow.

ii
In seven or so real Earth days,
a woman’s body transforms an ovum
into an implanted blastocyst. We call this
embryogenesis.
But don’t say the egg
is fertilized     
by the sperm
as if she waits dreamily at the doorway
to the fallopian cavern musing
about distant possibilities. Of the millions of sperm
on their way up the river, she calls only
a couple hundred. And though we cling
to the tale of the speeding destrier
penetrating the fortress through sheer grit,
science now thinks the egg chooses
which one may enter her, if any,
then pulls him in through a window,
hidden from the light.


* * * * *

Patricia Phillips-Batoma is a writer and teacher who lives in Illinois. She has published poems in Skylight 47, An Capall Dorcha, The New Verse News, Off Course, Plants and Poetry and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis.