Like a tennis ball sitting on a dish
Its northern hemisphere painted brown -black
With dots of pigment
Its southern side creamy white
Still-life lifeless.
But twenty minutes later,
Same ball, same dish,
But now the ball is two
Half-sized half moons,
And twenty minutes more

It’s four pie-shaped segments.
And so on and so on, until
Ten hours have passed,
Ten thousand little cells replace the ball.

So why is this special?
We humans love to clothe the living world

In anthropomorphic mystery.
But this little life, forming in a dish
Knows none of that.
It knows only the way to fashion itself
And the next generation of self.
And that does seem intriguing.
But in questioning how,
In studying mechanism,
We do not belittle the marvel
Or threaten its existence.
We simply begin to understand it
And realize us for what we are,
Just other forms of not still-life.