Poem by Mike Mesterton-Gibbons

Mouse To Mammoth?

Mutations’ permutations are the stuff

Of evolution: if effects in mice

Upscale to pachydermal size enough,

Siberia becomes a paradise

Enjoyed by mammoths, prophesize the guys

That grew a golden fleece of woolly hair

On quite colossal but non-mammoth-size

Mouse guinea pigs. The scientists declare

A hope: a mammoth calf is born in three

More years of tinkering, if genes for fur

Manipulate the hairless pedigree

Of elephants … From mouse to mammoth? Were

They mammoth brains, or woolly thinkers?—they

Have only mice with woolly DNA!

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, The Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, MONO, the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post and WestWard Quarterly. The poem was prompted by the Metro story, “Major step in return of the mammoth after scientists create ‘woolly mouse.'”