Poem: ‘The First Bite’ | Scientific American

Poem: ‘The First Bite’

By Gillian Neimark

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Edited by Dava Sobel

It’s been a billion years since blue green algae sequined
lakes and—like a python swallowing a pig—a protist ate one.
I see that pale hunter orbiting gloomy coves
tail whipping mellow waters, then guzzling a necklace
of cyanobacteria—
awareness tuned only
to that earthen, exquisite taste
not knowing that algae eat sunlight
and pluck electric arcs from water
exhaling long tongues of odorless oxygen
that suffocate anaerobes all over this earth.
It waits for its meal to die.
But one green bloom burns on
inside, spits flame, survives.
Night ebbs, day breaks
And now the protist feels pregnant
with a tiny sun god.
Together they tumble over the ocean
drunk with the liquors of light
each trying to cough up the other
to be alone again and just float sated.
Hundreds of millions of years of wrestling
until the captive, now a chloroplast
packed with pigments,
is fully formed
and engineers a biosphere:
A garden in the east, just shy of Eden
an apple, another reckless bite, exile
across the jeweled earth