This week brings the election edition of Deep Water – by which I mean it is about the people. And the people, as we see in Roger Carpentter’s poem “Biology,” are complex, with astonishingly intricate individual needs, acts and interiors. As the speaker in this poem walks down the street to a political meeting, surrounded by other people all going somewhere, he marvels at what I hope we can all take a moment to marvel at together this Election Day: the miracles that are walking around out there, right next to us.
Roger Carpentter has published poems in the Bangor Daily News, on FT.com, and in the Moon Pie Press anthology “Sun Shining on Snow.” He lives in Freeport.
Poets, please note that submissions to Deep Water are now open. Deep Water is especially eager to share poems by Black writers, writers of color, indigenous writers, and other underrepresented voices. There is a link to submit in the credits below.
Biology
By Roger Carpentter
Biology is happening in the street.
People walk past
breathing bleeding digesting decaying
under their skin and clothes.
How distracting to consider all this
while going to a meeting
to discuss politics and money
waiting to cross at the corner.
And each passing body hosts others
in tiny multitudes
merging and diverging on paths of blood and guts
hidden by shells of flesh and fabric.
Consider how this chaotic matter next to you
organizes into a face with eyes and a voice
unique among billions of others
all carrying their own communities
of vegetable and animal life
All of it somehow managing
to get to this street corner
and stand next to you, thinking.
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Biology,” copyright © 2020 by Roger Carpentter, appears by permission of the author. Submissions to Deep Water are open now and through the end of November. For more information, go to mainewriters.org/deep-water.
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