Hundred Million Years Ago Poem by gershon hepner

On the first day, God said: 'Let there be
some light! ' and till today it fills all our lives.
One hundred million years from now, then, He
decided that with butterflies and hives
He could improve the world, which had been duller
without the flowers that bring joy to lives
of all the creatures that enjoy their color
and scent. So He commanded: 'Fertilize! '
addressing butterflies and bees, an army
of insects who would work in symbiosis
to color all the world and make it balmy.
(It seems He did not make this clear to Moses,
who skipped a lot of details and foreshortened
the story of creation for the sake
of emphasizing all the things we oughtn't
to do, yet have, obedient to a snake.)
And it was so, according to His plan,
anticipating pleasure for the eyes
and noses of his favorite creature, Man,
long, lomg before He solved the problem how
to make a being like him. The solution
occurred to Him much later and is now
attributed to Darwin: evolution.

Inspired by an article in the NYR by Oliver Sacks ('Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers') in which Sacks points out that Darwin always had a special interet in plants. His father Erasmus had written a long two-volume poem called The Botanic Garden and while at Cambridge Darwin consistently attended the classes of the botanist J.S. Henslow, with whom he regularly corresponded while on his voyage in the Beagle. Darwin's plant specimens collected in the Galapagos were far stronger evidence for the theory of evolution that his study of finches whose full significance awaited the clarification of the ornithologist John Gould, James Dalton Hooker, a botanist from Kew Gardens. was the only person to whom he showed the first draft of his Origin of the Species. He continued working on botany till the end of his life, and in 1877 published a revised edition of his orchid book published fifteen years earlier. Sacks's friend Eric Korn found a copy of this book in which there was the counterfeit of an 1882 postal order for two shillings and ninepence, signed by Darwin himself, in payment for a new orchid specimen. He died in April of that year.

11/16/08