PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Unfortunate, when an experiment goes wrong,
but even then our students needed to know
the ethics by which to craft their practical response.
Ages ago, we had thoroughly seeded the
planetary terrarium, and the life there was thriving.
But a virus mutated in that vulnerable environment,
and began to assert its virulent dominance, world-wide.
(The students referred to this as the V*2,D---

Virulent Viral Dominance---
when writing their periodic observer reports.)
But even this was what we call a teaching moment,
an opportunity for students to learn while observing.
And so we, the Lab Assistants---administrators
and cultivators of the planetary terrarium---
introduced, there, a far more contagious infection,
easily opportunistic and excessively lethal---
(we had engineered it exactly for that)---
to which the V*2,D. was constitutionally vulnerable,
without shield of natural or acquired immunity.
The infection completely eradicated the V*2,D
terminating it with exponential rapidity;
and then, itself mutating almost consciously
(but that would be the most absurd science fiction),
it eradicated all other life from the terrarium's
surfaces and even its water pockets.
But even this unexpected development gave rise
to many well expressed papers from the students,
and some of the conclusions they derived
from various observations and calculations
were praised by several of our Senior Scientists.
Every group, however, has at least one radical:
in this case, a poet from some backworld in the
vicinity of Ursus Major, a minor
acquisition at best. And this poet,
writing a paper that was, otherwise, brilliant,
refused to refer to the offending virus as V*2,D;
but insisted (and refused to withdraw the proposal)
that we should designate that species by the sounds
(meaningless in our language, but recorded and preserved
in the Archives of the Trivial): Humanity.

Starward