Dazed, Clone and Cape Beach Daisies

By Marie Dustmann

Dazed

Half-dazed by winter sun
And bare liquid amber trees
I don’t recognise you.

Clone
Plants
Crisped to DNA sequences,
Are frozen in biological soups
To hibernate in vaults
And become
Genome journeyers
In space repositories,
A back-up Earth
In tin cans
Circling the solar system,
A coding of materials
Awaiting reactivation
As a new plan(e)t.

Cape Beach Daisies

Anthropods introduce
Arctotheca populifolia
To new environments.
The future form in the seed,
Plant imagination
With its own agenda
A template responding to new ingredients
Of wind, sand and temperature.
Nature moulding
The new from the old
Retaining paedomorphosic features
To specialise
And become
A salt lover
Forming
Sand-wreathes
From
Succulent leaves,
And yellow sun-bud
Self-pollinators,
A rapid evolver
Into a different species
Branched here
Divergent
From the original
In unfoldment,
The introduced
Now belonging.

This suite of poems is a public submission created for Red Room Poetry's New Shoots digital poetry anthology.