A New Year Greeting

    On this day tradition allots

        to taking stock of our lives,

    my greetings to all of you, Yeasts,

        Bacteria, Viruses,

    Aerobics and Anaerobics:

        A Very Happy New Year

    to all for whom my ectoderm

        is as Middle-Earth to me.

    For creatures your size I offer

        a free choice of habitat,

    so settle yourselves in the zone

        that suits you best, in the pools

    of my pores or the tropical

        forests of arm-pit and crotch,

    in the deserts of my fore-arms,

        or the cool woods of my scalp.

    Build colonies: I will supply

        adequate warmth and moisture,

    the sebum and lipids you need,

        on condition you never

    do me annoy with your presence,

        but behave as good guests should,

    not rioting into acne

        or athlete's-foot or a boil.

    Does my inner weather affect

        the surfaces where you live?

    Do unpredictable changes

        record my rocketing plunge

    from fairs when the mind is in tift

        and relevant thoughts occur

    to fouls when nothing will happen

        and no one calls and it rains.

    I should like to think that I make

        a not impossible world,

    but an Eden it cannot be:

        my games, my purposive acts,

    may turn to catastrophes there.

        If you were religious folk,

    how would your dramas justify

        unmerited suffering?

    By what myths would your priests account

        for the hurricanes that come

    twice every twenty-four hours,

        each time I dress or undress,

    when, clinging to keratin rafts,

        whole cities are swept away

    to perish in space, or the Flood

        that scalds to death when I bathe?

    Then, sooner or later, will dawn

        a Day of Apocalypse,

    when my mantle suddenly turns

        too cold, too rancid, for you,

    appetising to predators

        of a fiercer sort, and I

    am stripped of excuse and nimbus,

        a Past, subject to Judgement.

After an article by Mary J. Marples in Scientific American, January, 1969