- About
- People
- Undergraduate Students
- Graduate Students
- Research
- News & Kudos
- Events
kudos
Sixth Annual Biology World Poetry Day Contest
According to UNESCO's website, World Poetry Day is held every year on March 21 to celebrate one of humanity's most treasured forms of cultural and linguistic expression and identity. Read more here.
It is our great pleasure to announce the winners of the sixth annual Biological Sciences Poetry Contest. We would like to thank all the contributors. There are talented poets in our department, and this was a delightful task for the outreach and engagement committee!
- First prize – "Gameto-Fight Song" by Audrey Kemp (BISC Undergraduate student)
- Second prize - "In honour of Bombus terristris" by Amaris Hackney (Lab Manager, Salmon Watersheds Lab)
- Third prize – “Thermally Primed" by Audrey Kemp (BISC Undergraduate student)
On behalf of the Outreach and Engagement Committee congratulations to the winners!
Please read the poems below.
Gameto-fight song
By Audrey Kemp
Die, die diatoms
Gently down the drain
Fractals of silica
Grow on my plates
You are such a pain.
Die, die, diatoms
Checking all my trays
Specimens suffering
Fighting in vain
Time to end your reign.
Die, die, diatoms
Peroxide on my brain,
Ethanol, ethanol
Sterilized gloves
Vigilance is my refrain.
Bye, bye, diatoms
Your colony starts to wane
Helping my bull kelp
Bounce back from the strain
I’ve got you in your lane.
Why, why, diatoms
Do you still remain?
Growing and spreading and killing my kelp
Watching me go insane.
In honour of Bombus terrestris
by Amaris Hackney
I watched you struggle
With broken wings
Every day for 3 weeks
Climbing over clovers
Gathering supplies
Giving it all
So your daughters would survive
I went to the backyard
And searched to no end.
You were gone. My smallest friend.
Thank you for the lesson on
what it means to be a queen.
Thermally Primed
by Audrey Kemp
Modernity’s matador waves a heat map
The crimson cape’s a red flag
That bull kelp can’t chase forever.
Oxidative stress builds as radicals revolt
Cry toro and charge fast
Bull-headed grit
A phycologist’s gambit,
No time to shed seawater tears-
Why focus on the past
When Fucus is fighting for its future?
Is a locus the solution
Selection the cure?
Epigenetics is fraught with controversy
But can tolerance be taught
With chaperones and plasticity?
A molecular embrace
Tethers us to safer shores.
I’ll fold your proteins up in my arms
And holdfast to the substrate before it’s too late.
While the waves churn and roil,
Scientists like me toil
We yearn to turn the tide, even the odds
But thermally, all the numbers are prime.
Eyes on the bulls-eye, we load our pipettes
Keen to help
Let’s save the kelp
Hang on Nereo,
It’ll be a bumpy ride.