'2011/03/29 Darwin Was Adopted Poem by Margaret Alice

.......(Darwin’s hangup because he was adopted)

Oh dear, the pain, the angst, the fear,
alone at night in bed - knowing what
had been done and said: Darwin dear,
you have been adopted, is that clear -
Mama Darwin said, little Charles felt
so abandoned in his lonely bed,
knowing he had been left
at an early age

As he stared into the gorilla’s cage, he wondered
what would have happened if he had been a little
monkey too, with apelike mien and lots of fruits
to chew, wondered why he could not live high up
in a tree, the world, the sad, sad world from afar
to see, wondering why he were not a single-cell
organism in the oceans deep, where the waters
would his heart-ache keep

So Darwin boarded the HMS Beagle and went
a-sailing to the Galapagos Islands to flee his little
orphan life at home, he looked here and he looked
there, feeling sorry for himself and this little world
where animals lived by stealth and ate each other
to keep their health and plants bloomed in abun-
dant wealth; and said to himself: I wonder how it
happened that a whale resembles an elephant

While a rhinoceros seems related to a hippopotamus,
why did eyes form in two’s on little fishes while they
proliferated into millions of little apertures on spiders
and other creepy things, I am sure there is a lesson to
be learnt, I feel like falling into the rabbit hole and
ponder things with the Lory and Egret, my thoughts
are reeling and writhing in circles and there is a porpoise
on my trail - such were his thoughts as he flailed about

Trying to solve the riddle of his orphan existence: Could
there be a reason why the little oysters failed to see that
the walrus were planning to eat them – were they left
bereft of rational thought such as Descartes said homo
erectus possessed – and where did this thought process
originate – could it be too late to wrestle the magic of
existence from invisible gods in the sky above and offer
it to evolution as a new godhead instead

A new fairytale to explain life as it is and was – and maybe
to determine why my mother and father did not take care
of orphan me, but gave me up for adoption – I should have
been drowned, but as I was not – does this not prove the
magic of my youth – I am so evolved and will expand through
evolution into the magic father of a new natural science
revolution? – the young Darwin mused, a happy recluse,
embracing his orphan life with the gusto of

The theoretical gourmand who devours theories for breakfast
and loves himself for being the kindred spirit of all modern
thinkers, happy to bring about the apex of atheism; there is
no god, only nothingness that creates life all by itself, just as
lightning applied to a boiling mixture in the sea, and see –
the world is an orphan, godless – like me!