Thursday, April 25, 2013
I wrote this ten years ago, following a Wellcome party to celebrate the 50th birthday of Watson & Crick's publication
A double twist
Fifty years since Watson and Crick were shown
The butterfly brush of deoxyribonucleic acid on Rosalind’s
plate,
And saw in a flash how the whole thing hangs together.
The birthday party, oblique and elliptical,
curls like smoke around anonymous corridors.
So I walk home beside the black, strong-sliding Thames
And there in the dark, with urgent indignity, body clings
to body:
Two people hot on the panic mission of that orderly
molecule.
Then I smile to know that my mind, filled with the clean,
dry patterns of mathematics,
And this pair, burning only for scent and taste and touch,
Are the two strands that twist in each of us.
Of course it’s a double spiral tells us what we are.
Hard to imagine there was ever doubt – it seems so right
That running through us all, that spiral strand
Spins into gold pure thought and the flaxen animal stuff.
And love, too, surely a double twisted thread.
The chemical endlessly, blindly driving,
An engine pounding along its parallel rails,
To copy itself in toddling, laughing, chubby-fingered
form.
And the soul, lifting its mortal gaze from the void,
Setting a trusting foot on the ladder’s first link
Climbing the spiral, upwards, into the light.
Timandra Harkness, 24th June, 2003
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