An excerpt from "seeds"

From the author's website:
“Seeds” is a sequence from from my most recent book of poetry, A blueprint for survival (Guernica Editions, 2024), that thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of climate change and the sixth mass extinction. Each numbered section or ‘seed’ centres on a different organism or human-made object: lentil, snowdrop, codex, tardigrade, the order Hymenoptera, tiny house, among others. “Seeds” is inspired in part by The Ecologist’s 1972 report, A Blueprint for Survival, which was warning almost half a century ago of species loss, pollutants, population demands on food and water, the harmful effects of industrial-scale agriculture, and the global economy’s dangerous reliance on fossil fuels. I think of each ‘seed’ in this long poem as a blueprint, whether simple human-made tool or complex organism driven by its DNA to adapt to and respond to the current existential threat, each showing a different way of being in the world. I’m also interested in the idea of attention as a moral act, as observed by the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist: “without alertness, we are as if asleep, unresponsive to the world around us; without vigilance, we cannot become aware of anything we do not already know.” I want to focus attention as a form of respect for these organisms, not as resources, but as beings in their own right, withdrawn, dark noumena.