A poem about viruses?

I wrote this back during the COVID-19 pandemic. Still relevant, I think…

Photo taken by me, from a bacterial transformation via viral vector lab I did with students a few years back

Combinations of the four,

A, C, U, and G.

To build an RNA World, the oldest code

Of life’s bounty,

From beauty to beast and the range

Of Harriet’s creatures.

In the blink of an eye or

A bat’s wing,

A deadly code does thus refine

And failures are fickle teachers.

A virus born of the four,

Adenine, Cytosine, Uracil, and Guanine.

Pathogens persist at astonishing pace,

But to sustain a pandemic requires such

Insidious constituents

Of limited range and the same fucking face.

Authoritarian, Capitalism, Uneducation, and the GOP,

The horsemen of the Broken States.

Combinations of the four,

A, C, U, and G.

To break the New World.