WEBVTT

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"Characteristics of life."

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This is what happens
to poets, right?

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We read these little nuggets
of scientific information

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and then we feel like we have
to write poems about them.

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So this one has a little
epigraph from BBC nature news.

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A fifth of animals
without backbones

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could be at risk of
extinction, say scientists.

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"Characteristics of life."

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"Ask me if I speak
for the snail,

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and I will tell you I
speak for the snail.

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I speak of underneathedness
in the welcome of mosses,

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of life that springs up little
lives that pull back and wait

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for a moment.

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I speak for the damselfly, water
ski mollusk, the caterpillar,

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the beetle, the spider, the ant.

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I speak from the time before
spinelessness was frowned upon.

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Ask me if I speak
for the moon jelly,

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I will tell you one thing
today and another tomorrow

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and I will be as consistent as
anything alive on this Earth.

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I move as the currents
move with the breezes.

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What part of your
nature drives you?

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You in your cubicle
ought to understand me.

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I filter and filter
and filter all day.

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Ask me if I speak
for the nautilus,

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and I will be silent as the
nautilus shell on a shelf.

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I can be beautiful
and useless if that's

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all you know to ask of me.

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Ask me what I know
of longing, and I

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will speak of distances between
meadows of night blooming

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flowers.

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I will speak the impossible
hope of the firefly.

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You with the candle burning and
only one chair at your table

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must understand such
wordless desire.

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To say it is mindless
is missing the point."

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